





Library of Che Theological Seminary 
PRINCETON ° NEW JERSEY 
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PRESENTED BY 


John Stuart Conning, D.D. 


DS 141 .L48 1925 | 
Lewisohn, Ludwig, 1882-1955. 
Israel | 








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Books by Ludwig Lewisohn 


The Broken Snare 

The Modern Drama 

The Spirit of Modern German Literature 
The Poets of Modern France 

The Drama and the Stage 

Up-Stream: An American Chronicle 

Don Juan 

The Creative Life 

Israel 


Books Edited and Translated by 
Ludwig Lewisohn 


Créveccur: Letters of an American 
Farmer 

Sudermann: The Indian Lily 

Halbe: Youth 

Hirschfeld: The Mothers 

The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Haupt- 
mann. Seven Volumes 

Latzko: The Judgment of Peace 

Wassermann: The World’s Illusion 

A Modern Book of Criticism (The Mod- 
ern Library) 


Books with Introductions by 
Ludwig Lewisohn 


Gourmont: A Book of Masks 

Newberry: The Poems of Paul Fort 

Frenssen: Joern Uhl (The Modern 
Library) 


Books with Contributions by 
Ludwig Lewisohn 


These United States 
Our Changing Morality 





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COPYRIGHT 1925 ows BY 
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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES 
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First printing, November, 1925 
Second printing, November, 1925 
Third printing, December, 1925 


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MAHLER: Song of the Persecuted 
Man in the Tower. 


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CONTENTS 


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INTRODUCTION 


It is the first of May of the year nineteen-hundred 
and twenty-five. The spring is late and harsh despite 
the full, dark foliage of the poplars, the whiteness of 
cherry-blossoms in all orchards, the rapture of skylarks 
over the upland meadows of the Wiener Wald. Hin- 
denburg has just been elected to the presidency of the 
German Republic; Italy, Spain, Poland, Hungary and 
the Balkan States have become primitive military des- 
potisms. Official France plays the liberal because there 
is nothing left for her to conquer. Britain, though under 
a conservative government, clings to her ancient mod- 
eration and humanity. In America an intrepid minority 
is creating a new and fruitful culture. But at the same 
time great masses of her people are being infected with 
the most ignominious superstitions and a soldier in her 
armies is sentenced to forty years at hard labor on the 
suspicion of having sympathized with the equal des- 
potism of the Communists. 

The human scene is not gay. It becomes almost un- 
bearable when, by the help of detailed knowledge and 
a strong imagination, one penetrates to the concrete 
stripes and slayings, to the imprisonments and persecu- 
tions, the desolation and the dread that underlie any 
general descriptive statement of the political condition 
of the world. 

Among the sources of the thinker’s dismay perhaps 

[ ix ] 


INTRODUCTION 


the deepest is this, that much of the craft and cruelty 
which darken the earth spring from the supposedly 
nobler aspects of human nature and are implicated with 
things sacred and venerable from of old to the hearts 
of men. Who would not free the soil of his fatherland 
from a foreign ruler? Who would not wish to keep pure 
the speech and manners of his forbears from influences 
that seem sinister because they are strange? Who, see- 
ing his country in danger, would quibble over moral 
trifles? What long-oppressed and liberated people will 
not guard its political and cultural sovereignty against 
those minorities that the accidents of human migration 
or the necessity of safe frontiers have cast within its 
boundaries? The German reactionaries brooding over 
revenge, and the bloody tyrants of Poland can both 
appeal to famous examples, to heroic names, to old, 
sonorous verses—to a tradition taught in every school, 
graven into every monument, held to be part of the in- 
heritance of every generous heart. It takes the sad lu- 
cidity of the experienced thinker to be shocked by the 
gross and violent immorality of “Theirs not to reason 
why, theirs but to do and die!’ The schoolboy will not 
see that this attitude literally reduces men to the level 
of animals. Nor will he, when repeating the Vergilian 
verse 


tw regere imperio populos, Romane, memento! 


reflect upon the people murdered, the cities razed, the 
temples ruined in order that the “peace” of Rome might 
prevail. 

The tradition of force and of the unthinking loyalties 
to its instruments is implanted early and hence all but 


[x] 


INTRODUCTION 


ineradicably in the mind. At the core of the young 
human creature’s heart there smolders an element of 
primordial fear. Nor must one forget how often 
psychical accidents deepen this fear into a suspicion of 
inferiority. The adolescent is therefore commonly con- 
cerned with the effort to be the equal of his fellows or, 
if possible, their superior. In the life of the imagination 
he will inevitably identify himself with those that are 
strong, that prevail, that impose their will upon others. 
The Judzo-Christian ethos scarcely touches the fringes 
of his character. His human weakness sustains itself by 
an inner identification with wielders of swords, riders 
of plumed horses, marchers in armies with banners. 
From these fancies he derives a sense of power and 
security. He is no longer alone and no longer afraid. 
He is part of an unconquerable mass of his equals. 
And the total power of that mass he feels to be his own. 
He becomes a patriot and is willing to be a soldier out 
of the depth of his fears. Men, in brief, can be gathered 
into armies because they are afraid. They can be thrust 
into uniforms because they fear the ache of aloneness 
and of a possible inferiority. A man in uniform is 
“as good as the next man’; one with a stripe on his 
sleeve has risen slightly above his fellows yet not lost 
the protection of the mass. A world without fear could 
be a world of peace. 

What, then, in fact, sustains and perpetuates the con- 
servative tradition everywhere, the tradition of war- 
like patriotism, of royalism, revenge, belligerent racial 
solidarity, is the residuum of a terror that was old when 
Babylon was built and the palaces of Minos flourished. 
Thousands of years of the most primitive protective 


[ xi ] 


INTRODUCTION 


social cohesion among men implanted that terror. If 
a man wandered ever so little from the protection of 
his tribe hostile men and wild beasts destroyed him 
on the instant. No wonder that among savages any 
deviation from tribal rite and custom was and is pun- 
ished with death. Blind loyalty is in that primitive 
situation in fact the price of the tribe’s survival. States- 
men and captains, citizens and soldiers, tyrants and 
persecutors, led by the tribal bards from Tyrtzus to 
Kipling, still act from within the old terror of the 
feeble tribe striving to avert extinction in the forests 
and deserts of the early world. 

The patriotic tradition, seen in its true character, is 
not a tradition that was ever rationally examined or 
embraced. It is not a great and good tradition at all. 
Charged as it is with the splendor of art and letters, 
it is yet but a survival of old fears and barbarous in- 
stincts. It antedates the use of the reason in the ex- 
amination of human experience which was first made 
in Greece in the sixth century before Christ; it ante- 
dates the discovery by the sages and prophets of Israel 
in the same century of those moral concepts that first 
measured the state not by its power, but by its use- 
fulness to the citizen and changed the sullen tribal slave 
into the free man. It is no accident that the forces 
of reaction are everywhere both orthodox and anti- 
Semitic, hostile to reason and to righteousness, alien- 
ated from both Greece and Judea. 

It is clear then, that it is this twofold tradition of 
reason and righteousness and no other that is the great 
and good tradition of Western mankind. Its repre- 
sentatives are not statesmen and nationalistic poets, not 


[ xii ] 


INTRODUCTION 


strong priests and victorious captains. Its represen- 
tatives and symbols are the martyrs of science, thought 
and peace, the eternally heterodox, the eternal resisters 
of myth and force and hate. Montaigne and Spinoza, 
Bacon and Voltaire, Lessing and Goethe, Hazlitt and 
Shelley, Thoreau and Whitman, Romain Rolland and 
Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein—these and their 
fellows have created the one tradition that saves us 
from that primordial barbarism into which men are 
always straining to relapse. 

Chaos is still very close to us. Recorded history 
which seems quite immemorial to short-lived man is but 
an hour in the long year of being. Barbaric man plays 
with intricate inventions to his own hurt and, inno- 
cent of both reason and righteousness, thinks himself 
an intelligent creature. Yet within his heart and mind 
he differs scarcely a whit from the savage tribesmen 
who were his forbears and all the forces of patriotism 
and historic religion tend to keep him fettered in his 
darkness of superstition and futile agitation. Hence 
we must not hope too vividly nor must we be cast 
down at the constant recurrence upon the human scene 
of war and irrational tumult. If we but tend the one 
central and in truth sacred fire, if we seek to preserve 
and to extend the one tradition of salvation that is 
ours, we shall have driven another edge of light into 
the primordial darkness, we shall have conquered an- 
other province of chaos and given it significance and 
form. 

This book tells the story of how an entire people, a 
small and scattered one but still a people, is prepar- 


ing to dedicate itself consciously to the service of rea- 
| [ xiii | 


INTRODUCTION 


son and of peace. ‘That people has shared the bar- 
barisms, the wars, the delusions of all other peoples. 
But its will has never been wholly subdued nor its 
conscience wholly persuaded. Driven partly by an 
inner urgency, partly by the intense savagery of this 
hour in history, it has determined to express that will 
and that conscience which were purged of the grosser 
lusts for war and victory and dominance by its unfor- 
gotten prophets of five-and-twenty centuries ago. 
Whether in America or in Europe or in Palestine, the 
House of Jacob is remembering its necessary service 
to mankind—to resist unrighteousness, to break every 
yoke, to establish peace. 

The other day the British minister for the Colonies 
received in Jerusalem delegates representing the vari- 
ous sections of the Palestinian population. The Arabs 
sent by the Mohammedan-Christian Union protested 
against Jewish immigration, Jewish agriculture, Jew- 
ish schools and colleges. Mr. Amery replied that the 
Jews were bringing money and energy into the land, 
were reclaiming the waste places, were asking no one’s 
help in the establishment of their schools of science and 
of learning. Thus, he plead, they were doing good to 
the entire land and added that it would be well if the 
Arab majority would also devote itself to such works 
of peace. His answer was received in silence. At last 
the Emir Omar el-Bittar of Jaffa drew himself up 
to speak. His words were these: “In al-Din-din, Ye- 
hudi ibn Yehudi! (“Cursed be the faith of thy faith, O 
Jew, son of a Jew!”) Is not this answer profoundly 
symbolic of all the ancient barbarisms of man, of the 
spirit that underlies all racial enmities and rivalzies, all 

[ xiv ] 


INTRODUCTION 


patriotism that divides, all pride that leads to combat? 
What is the answer of the Jews to that dark and irra- 
tional cry? To reclaim more waste places, to open their 
clinics and hospitals and their university to the Arabs. 
Even as pacifists have never succeeded in curbing war, 
so the tradition of reason and righteousness may in this 
instance go down to temporary disaster as it has often 
done before. But to be truly human is to believe that 
it will prevail in the end, to act and work as though 
it must prevail, to sustain it without faltering and 
against all odds. Man may not become human as soon 
as we hope. In the meantime we shall at least have 
been. 


[ xv] 





ISRAEL 


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CHAPTER I 
OUT OF THE WEST 


I 


SEEKING for the precise beginning of this pilgrimage 
which brought me finally to where Mount Hermon, 
gray and formidable, looks over into Galilee, I find it, 
of all places, in Chicago. About us was the frosty 
blue-and-gold of an American winter. Behind the 
sweep of the avenues of the South Side one felt the 
glitter and heard the hard, small beat of Michigan. 
My two friends and I walked on toward the Standard 
Club. 

There were many things to talk about, but we came 
-back from books and people and events to the ever- 
lasting Jewish question which seemed on that day, as 
on many others before and since, like an obsession, a 
secret anguish to be eased by words. We three were 
Jews. But we agreed, among other things, that the 
obsession was not confined to us. Israel, that small 
and scattered people, was gnawing, as it had often done 
before, at the world’s consciousness. ‘Technical anti- 
Semitism, we remarked, had reached our shores, so that 
numerous men and women were as absorbed by our kind 
as passionate prohibitionists are by liquor or negative 
moralists by sex. 

We went into the club and settled down at a table. 
My friend the surgeon, broad, blond, sagacious, with 
calm blue eyes behind precise spectacles, tried for a 


[19 ] 


ISRAEL 


minute or two to be ironic and even gay. But practical 
experiences of an untoward sort were too close to him. 
Life had pressed upon him. He summed up all that 
weighed on him, the total of a hundred personal and 
kindred burdens, simply but with an air of finality: 
“We are not wanted anywhere.” 

It was characteristic of him that he sought the center 
of our problem in the world without and was depressed 
but not embittered, melancholy but not morbid. He 
would, I knew, steep himself more and more in his 
specific tasks and, by a definite discipline, try to live 
as though the question that was troubling him today 
did not exist. 

Of such a discipline my other friend, the lawyer, 
was not capable. I can see now that electric dark 
face, heavy, passionate, impatient lips, great forehead, 
tireless eyes. He had, so far, said only a few abrupt, 
acrid things. Now he seemed, for a moment, to col- 
lapse within himself, then to arise in violent protest 
against his own momentary weakness and to gather 
himself for a great repudiation. But what he said at 
last, what rather he cried out, was strangely out of 
keeping with the accustomed play of his extraordinarily 
vigorous and scrupulous'mind: “I hate the Jews! I 
hate myself!” ... 3 

From these two sayings it is possible to gain a pro- 
found insight into the position of every minority group 
within any civilization and, above all, of that permanent 
and classical minority group which is post-exilic Jewry. 

The first mark of the position of a minority is its 
complete lack of self-determination. Do what it may, 
the terms of its very existence are fixed for it by the 

[ 20 ] 


OUT OF THE WEST 


mere weight and tendencies and habits of the surround- 
ing majority. And this is no less true when that ma- 
jority is friendly than when it is hostile. Favor and 
disfavor are the moods of the masters. Laws, insti- 
tutions, manners are decreed and arbitrarily fixed by 
the majority. There is no situation in life into which, 
for a member of the minority group, there do not enter 
elements of strangeness and of force. He may either 
intellectually or as a matter of habit approve the con- 
ditions of life dictated for him; he may consent to them 
with a sincerity in which his own searching can find 
no flaw. He did not create them. His occupation, 
the place and character of his dwelling, his very ap- 
pearance and demeanor conform to rules and instincts 
that he has not made and cannot change. 

Of this fundamental fact the majority need not be 
conscious. In America during many years it was not, 
but honestly and proudly offered the only freedom a 
majority has ever yet offered—the freedom to be like 
itself. The minority accepted this offer so far as it 
could, with indeed an amazing completeness, sometimes 
beyond its strength. An equilibrium, an apparent 
equilibrium was thus established. 

But this equilibrium is always profoundly unstable. 
Whenever the majority becomes conscious of the char- 
acter of its offer of freedom and equality, the minority’s 
conformity will be found incomplete, the equilibrium 
will be destroyed, there will be, in the grosser and more 
obvious sense, oppressors and oppressed. Old favors 
will be withdrawn, old immunities cease to be exer- 
cised, old exceptions to be made. The fact that the 
minority is at the majority’s mercy becomes a naked 


[ 21 | 


ISRAEL 


and a cruel one. A fact it always was. But now it is 
part of the open rumor of the marketplace. 

Such is the history of the Jews in every Western 
country during the past half century. Such is their 
history in America too. Once the Jewish fellow citizen 
was heartily patronized, the rare Jewish intellectual 
generously protected. His proficiency in American 
ways of life and thought was regarded as a subtle com- 
pliment to those ways. ‘The Jew was petted like a 
precocious child, like a cripple who had learned to 
dance... 

Those days, comfortable but not quite honorable, are 
over. The majority has decided, as it always does and 
always must decide, that its offer of the freedom to be 
like itself has been imperfectly accepted. ‘The minority, 
remembering old comforts and immunities, still pro- 
tests. But the majority, utterly savage as its funda- 
mental assumptions are, is right in fact. Its impossible 
demand has, in truth, not been met, for the plain rea- 
son that it cannot be and should not be. And the re- 
sults of this cognition are what they have been every- 
where and always—direct and at last conscious pres- 
sure. We are a courteous people in America and in 
many ways a kindly one. In many circles the New 
England strain and the old tradition are still in power. 
I do not believe that conditions in America are ever 
likely to approximate in degree the conditions found 
in so enlightened a country as Germany. In kind the 
conditions are already identical: the attempted and 
often successful exclusion of Jews from study, teach- 
ing, practice or proper preferment in the liberal pro- 
fessions, their expulsion from definite houses, streets, 

[ 22 ] 


OUT OA DELLE. MW ES TL 


neighborhoods, hostelries, resorts, the growing estrange- 
ment and division in all forms of social and corporate 
life—these are the classical devices by which the ma- 
jority seeks always and everywhere to extrude from 
the national body a minority which has not, as indeed 
it cannot and should not, accepted the offer to assimi- 
late and disappear. ‘Thus, despite a thousand or ten 
thousand personal exceptions and a thousand ease- 
ments in specific small circles here and there, we have 
in America today the condition which my friend the 
surgeon summed up subjectively but exactly: We are 
not wanted anywhere. 

The human spirit has borne no stranger fruits in all 
its long and tortuous history than are found among 
these Jews who are rejected where they are at home, 
who seek to live their own life and also the life that is 
demanded of them, who seek to buy inner peace and 
outer security at a price that, from the nature of things, 
no man can pay. 

Thus the middle-class American of what he calls 
Jewish faith is commonly, like his cultural equal among 
his Gentile fellow citizens, a man of little or no faith 
at all. He may pay for a pew in a temple of the 
reformed persuasion, he may even be seen in that pew 
on certain high holidays. 'Those emotions in him that 
are deeply akin to the religious are more likely to be 
awakened over a book, or at a play, an opera or a 
concert. Yet he must sustain that sectarian affilia- 
tion, since it is the frail shield of his exposed position. 
According to the argument that sustains him, he dif- 
fers from other Americans by his religion alone. Hence 
he must cleave to that religion. The reformation of 

[ 23 | 


ISRAEL 


his cult permits him to be in his office on the Sab- 
bath, even to attend worship on Sunday. The Day of 
Atonement finds him, if not fasting, yet at home. 

Since the division between himself and his fellow- 
men is so slight in theory, it should be equally so in 
practice. The reverse is true. Our American friend 
of Jewish faith may be almost blond and straight- 
nosed; he may be admirably like the majority in pro- 
nunciation and manner; he may have a son at Harvard 
and a daughter at Vassar; he may have abbreviated 
his name. Yet when he sits at the head of his board 
the guests will be Levinskys and Rosenfelds; his table 
at his luncheon club—we are safe in assuming him to 
be a business man or a lawyer—will hear voices in which 
the echo of the ancestral prayer and study-chant will 
still be audible. His son and his daughter will have 
Gentile friends at college. But these friendships will, 
after graduation, fade by what has all the appearance 
of mutual consent. 

Despite his theory our friend does not, in fact, seek 
Gentile society. Firstly he is, as a rule, rather sensitive 
and self-respecting. He does not wish to be where 
he is not wanted; and memories and instincts warn 
him that he probably is not. Secondly, though he may 
deny it both vigorously and even blithely, he knows 
his position to be an exceedingly precarious one. Let | 
a Unitarian, for instance, rebuff him socially—his en- 
tire theory crumbles. ‘Thus, for the sake of his inner 
equilibrium, he must associate exclusively with those 
who are in a like position and live by the same assump- 
tions. In his circles you find a complete and admirable 


imitation of Gentile culture. It seems to differ from 
[ 24 ] 


OUT OCS UE Be Wek ST. 


the real thing only by a more passionate love of the 
arts and by the almost complete absence of anyone but 
Jews. These Jews, moreover, can never be a shade 
more orthodox than himself. They must never harbor 
a doubt of the complete success of the assimilationist 
theory. 

If our friend’s social contacts are circumscribed for 
the sake of his soul’s security, his citizenship is of an 
even more fettered kind. Though he lives by the asser- 
tion of equality, he is always impelled to be more pub- 
lic-spirited and patriotic than his Gentile neighbor in 
order to attain it. He embraces positions of public 
trust with an inordinate satisfaction and feels flattered 
when he is asked to contribute effort or money to the 
general welfare. His whole life as a citizen is a petitio 
principt. Yet he fares well enough in matters that 
pertain to his city and his state. In matters interna- 
tional his way is still harder. He wishes to share the 
opinions of other Americans of good social and pro- 
fessional standing and to conform to them. Alas, he 
cannot quite rejoice in the independence of Poland; 
he cannot love Rumania despite her sufferings dur- 
ing the war under the heel of the Prussian. He has a 
sneaking kindness for the pre-war Germany of Rathe- 
nau, Dernburg, Ballin, even though he spent himself, 
his substance, his sons’ blood for the Allies; he has— 
and dare not whisper it to his own soul—a shadow of 
tolerance for the Soviets who put down pogroms and 
gave the Jews complete civic equality. He is an 
American. He is a one-hundred-per-cent American. 


Yet he brings to all his political reactions another, an 
[ 25 ] 


ISRAEL 


international consciousness. In extreme cases he curses 
that internationalist prejudice. It remains. 

He does other curious things that belie his assump- 
tions. He is proud of Jewish achievement. One does 
not find Methodists or Anglicans so passionate in this 
matter. Our friend will not overemphasize such things. 
He will show good taste, according to Nordic stand- 
ards, though the heavens fall. But he is not a little 
pleased with relativity and psychoanalysis and the new 
art of the theater. He will appreciate Mahler and 
Bloch in music, Sassoon in poetry, Schnitzler and Was- 
sermann in prose. On a lower level he will sometimes 
ferret out Jewish artists and scientists of far smaller 
achievements and read lists of them and their doings 
in some periodicals printed for Americans “of his 
faith.” He is a generation or two removed from ritual 
or religious observance; he does not know the ancestral 
tongue or the history or legends of his people; his chil- 
dren are not permitted to hear even those scraps of 
colloquial Hebrew that persist longest. He is an 
American, an American! But his friends are Jews 
and his interests are tinged with Jewishness and he 
compensates for his protestations and his actions by 
pride in whatever his people shows of genius or of 
glory. He is unhappy in the presence of Gentiles 
whom he suspects of the faintest prejudice; he is un- 
happy in the presence of Jews whom he suspects of — 
anti-assimilationist beliefs. He is an American! Yet 
when he hears of a mixed marriage he shakes his head. 
He has no objection in principle. He is afraid it can 
come to no good. It fills him, too, with a strange, 


faint feeling of loss) Why? Why? He ponders. 
[ 26 | 


OULD OF (THE WEST 


What has he to do with the integrity of Israel? He 
is too enlightened scientifically to believe that any racial 
strain is unmixed. His faith, heaven knows, has no 
propagandist ardor. It does not worry him to see the 
temples empty. What is wrong with him? He is an 
American. He will be an American! Yet when, at 
breakfast, he opens his paper, he glances first at the 
Jewish names among the notices of deaths and births, 
feels a faint sinking of the heart at a cabled report of 
anti-Jewish agitation at a Hungarian university, is 
consoled by the fact that a Jewish Egyptologist has, 
despite protest, been called to Munich, and that Mr. 
Rosenwald of Chicago has given another magnificent 
contribution to negro education. Driven into a corner, 
he will admit these things. But he is not often driven 
into a corner. Gentiles will not think of asking the 
question. ‘Toward non-assimilationist Jews he plays 
the part of anger or indignation. He will not permit 
his Americanism to be impugned, certainly not by for- 
eigners! Did he not. ... Does he not. ... He even 
likes baseball. 
II 


He is not a tragic figure. Not yet. He still con- 
sents inwardly to his Jewishness and controls his world 
with the instincts of his blood. His consciousness still 
has enough Jewish content to make his position, pre- 
carious and absurd though it be, tolerable for a time. ... 

His children are in different case. From their minds 
all Jewish content has been drained. They identify 
not only themselves but their historic past with the 


people among whom they live. The American Revo- 
[ 27 ] 


ISRAEL 


lution was theirs, although their fathers heard of it as 
a faint rumor in the Ghetto of Frankfort or the darker 
Ghetto of Minsk; the Renaissance was theirs despite 
the cap and shameful gabardine of their fathers in the 
cities of Italy; the crusades were theirs despite the fires 
and flayings and majestic martyrdoms of Mainz and 
York and Toulouse. Faintly they wonder, as at a 
legend, at those strange Jewish men and women who, 
all through the Dark Ages, slew their children with their 
own hands rather than consent to apostasy. Of Titus 
they remember his love affair with Berenice because 
Racine has written about it; they forget his dealings 
with the Temple. They are quite attuned to echoing 
the gibe of Horace: “Credat Judeus Apella!’”’ For 
while Gentile ignorance and superstition seem to them 
part of that historic process which their imaginations 
have embraced, and are celebrated by the poets and 
novelists with whom they live, Jewish ignorance and 
superstition are devoid for them of both poetry and 
pathos and are allied in their minds with associations 
from which they are eager to escape. ‘They see the 
high poetry of the Mass, not of the ram’s horn blown 
as the Day of Atonement draws to its solemn close; 
they have an eclectic appreciation of the mystics of 
Christendom from Saint Teresa to Swedenborg but 
have not heard of the Master of the Name and think 
of Chasidim dancing on the eve of Simchat Torah as 
dirty and discreditable folk. To them Fundamentalists 
are funny, Talmudists repulsive. . . . 

Taxed with this attitude, they will admit and defend 
it. The argument runs thus: We are living in an en- 
lightened age and are citizens, first of the country of 

[ 28 | 


OUT OF THE WEST 


our birth or allegiance, next of that central domain 
of Western civilization of which our country is a part. 
We are in no respect different from our fellows; their 
history, literature, tradition have, in point of fact, be- 
come as our own. Our minds are as much at home as 
our bodies and, anyhow—at this point a perceptible 
hesitation always sets in—to admit any difference in 
tradition or, above all, instinct is merely to play into 
the hands of the anti-Semite. As it is, we bear a 
burden for which we can find no inner reason, suffer 
exclusions to which nothing within us consents, have 
thrust upon us a guilt of which our souls are free. 
And that is why—here our friends commonly become 
passionate—that is why we dislike Jewish superstition, 
ignorance, vulgarity, assertiveness, display, servility, 
extremes of wealth or poverty, all that we find it so 
easy to tolerate in Gentiles, because we are made re- 
sponsible for all these things, are made co-sharers of 
them, bearers of whatever guilt or ugliness they in- 
volve. ‘That is why, broad in our sympathies as the 
world, we exclude all things Jewish from these sym- 
pathies, for it is our supposed portion in these Jewish 
things that shuts us out from clubs, fraternities, of- 
fices, emoluments, opportunities, friendships, alliances. 
. . . Jewish characteristics become an ache to us, the 
Jewish face becomes unbeautiful. . . . Are these not 
the whips held over us and the irons wherewith we 
are branded? We will escape, we must escape this 
meaningless curse, this dreadful shadow, this simu- 
lacrum out of a past of which we know nothing... . 
These are the pitiful people who change their names 
beyond recognition, who, in other lands—not yet among 
[ 29 ] 


ISRAEL 


us—become professional anti-Semites, editors of Pan- 
Slavic or Pan-Germanic papers. . . . The nobler ones 
break out at moments of spiritual tension into that 
ery of my friend: I hate myself; I hate the Jews... . 

Subtle as their experiences are, they are normal so 
long as the theory prevails among men that uniformity 
is a positive good and that it is the right and indeed 
the duty of every majority to force minorities into the 
ultimate subservience of assimilation. ‘The moral at- 
mosphere of societies and polities so constituted makes 
every minority characteristic an abnormality, an ugly 
abnormality. ‘The sense of the abnormality of all non- 
majority characteristics is so pervasive that it filters 
into the sensitive minds among the minority too. Also, 
there is among all peoples a necessary percentage of 
that strangest of creatures the snob who regards what 
is other than himself as desirable and what is removed 
from him as noble. Careless of spiritual values, he is 
taken in by the vain pretensions of others and emulates 
whatever is fashionable, glittering, spuriously at ease. 
McCarthys become Cartiers and Kaisers Kenneths as 
well as Moseses Moss. Catholics may become Prot- 
estant; Germans may cultivate jazz; Jews hate the 
Jewish nose... | 

Is it not then, the assimilationists whom I have de- 
scribed will say, is it not then the majority pressure 
which is alone responsible for our miseries, our trage- 
dies and, if you will have it so, our dishonorable passion 
for escape? Why should we be blamed for the mad- 
ness that pervades the world? 

The world is indeed mad in its deductions and its 


methods. It is not mad in its initial perceptions. ‘The 
[ 30 | 


OUT OF THE WEST 


wildest and silliest anti-Semite starts out with a per- 
fectly correct perception: the perception that the Jew 
is different from himself. Without that initial fact of 
consciousness the anti-Semite could never have dreamed, 
would never have dreamed of embracing his wild 
theories; without that fact he could not persuade others 
to share them. If a minority does not, to the unan- 
swerable common instincts of the majority, differ from 
itself, it would no longer be felt as a minority and the 
pressure, which is the result of the perception of dif- 
ference, would automatically cease. Such is the iron 
fact. It is not pressure that produces Jewish differen- 
tiation; it is the persistence of Jewish differentiation 
that causes pressure. 

I do not deny that persecution produces solidarity, 
that danger makes for cohesion. But these factors have 
been wrongly emphasized and interpreted. The posi- 
tive forces have been more powerful at nearly all pe- 
riods of Jewish history. ‘The production of that vast 
literature which is known as Talmudical was prompted 
by the passionate desire of the Jewish people to re- 
main a people even after the destruction of the state, 
the city and the temple. This nation, which held itself 
to be the bearer of certain religious and ethical notions 
of transcendent import, determined to remain a na- 
tion upon terms new in the history of mankind. It 
had no country now, no rulers, no instrument of war. 
It was powerless, defenseless, scattered. It clung to 
its law which, though held divine in origin, was so 
practical and detailed and concrete in character that 
under it the Jew remained a Jew, the member of a 
peculiar people, in Africa or Spain, in Rome as truly 


[31 ] 


YSRAEL 


us once in Jerusalem. This law the great schools of 
learning of the East extended and promulgated. In 
the first half millennium of the Christian era, amid 
darkness, confusion, the conflict of creeds and the down- 
fall of classical civilization, the Jews learned the lesson 
of being a nation by the force of the spirit alone, by 
cleaving to an idea, a tradition, a faith. 

It was thence that they drew the power to suffer 
and resist the persecution of the next thousand years. 
Concerning this persecution both Jews and Gentiles 
-are accustomed to speak in vague terms of admiration 
and respect. When one leaves vague phrases and vague 
knowledge and studies the facts and reads the con- 
temporary chronicles, those for instance, that pertain 
to the period of the Crusades, one is no longer con- 
tented with the ordinary descriptions and characteri- 
zations. This millennial martyrdom of a people was, 
on the one hand, without definite hope of surcease or 
of any possible triumph over a hostile world. ‘The 
blood of the Jewish martyr was never, like that of the 
Christian, the seed of any church, the sacrifice by which 
anything he loved could hope to conquer or prevail. 
This martyrdom was, on the other hand, different from 
that of the Armenian people. ‘There was always a 
way out; there was always the gate of apostasy. Jew- 
ish martyrdom, like that of the Christian saints, was 
an active martyrdom. But it was an active martyrdom | 
without hope. Again and again in the course of the 
centuries tender women slew their children, husbands 
their wives, sons their mothers, rather than have them 
fall a prey to crusader or inquisitor. With their last 
cries they declared the unity of the Eternal. Yet they 

[ 82 ] 


OUT OP OPH ER Wks T 


did not die for a theological dogma. They died for the 
integrity of Israel; they died that their nation might 
Xive—not, like the soldiers of some political state, that 
their flag should not be humbled, or their provinces 
taken from them. These things were not theirs. They 
died in order that from this world of power, war, force, 
hate, there might not disappear one “kingdom of 
priests,’ one “holy nation,” one people that had for- 
ever exchanged the edge of the sword for the witness 
of the spirit. 

That terrible millennium of resistance not only more 
than decimated the Jewish people; it also enfeebled 
them. Dry Talmudical hair-splitting alternated with 
febrile Messianic hope. Not even the apostasy of Sab- 
batai Zevi, the pretended Messiah, could rob thousands 
of all by which they had learned to live. No health 
came to the soul of the Jewish people until, in desolate 
Polish fields and villages, arose the Chassidic teaching 
of mystical union with God, of the spirit and not the 
letter of the law sanctifying action and passion, of the 
end being that each man become a law, a Torah in his 
own right. And Chassidism came from within and was, 
like all previous movements, a movement within that 
spiritual entity and community which is the Jewish na- 
tion. It never occurred either to the Chassidim or to 
their opponents that they were anything but Jews, as 
it had not occurred to Talmudist or martyr of Spanish 
magnate or Arabic scholar or Persian Prince of the 
Captivity. 

The French revolution came and gradually, very 
gradually and sporadically, the gates of the Ghetto 
were opened. Contempt, servitude, restrictive laws, 


[ 33 ] 


ISRAEL 


special taxes remained. Citizenship was not granted 
the Jews of England till 1832 nor the Jews of Prussia 
till 1847. But this gesture and similar gestures else- 
where earlier and later, more and less sincere, were 
supposed capable of obliterating the historic existence, 
consciousness, experience of a people that had been a 
people for three thousand years. 

This was the fallacy of the Gentiles; this is the fallacy 
of the unhappy assimilationist. Both he and the semi- 
benevolent Gentile are deceived by the uniqueness of 
the position of the Jewish nation. Nationhood is iden- 
tified with land, armies, power. The continued ex- 
istence of Jewry from the Babylonian captivity to the 
French Revolution, a period of roughly two thousand 
three hundred years, proves that there is one nation 
without the conventional attributes of nationhood. 

So soon as this incontrovertible fact is grasped, 
it is easy to see the triviality and irrelevance of those 
discussions concerning race which have made such a 
noise in the world in recent years. Like every other 
people, the English, the German, the French, the Jews 
are racially mixed. As Celtic, Saxon, Latin and pre- 
Aryan blood is found in all these peoples, or, to employ 
another method of differentiation, Nordic, Alpine and 
Mediterranean, so the Jews in their enormously long 
history have undergone racial intermixture. The his-— 
toric process evidently transcends the question of race 
and shapes peoples by forces which we are not in- 
structed enough to grasp. Jews differ among them- 
selves as widely as a Tyrolese German differs from a 
Schleswiger, a Provencal from a Norman, a Creole 
from a Vermonter. They remain Jews, even as these 

[ 34 ] 


OUT OF THEA WEST 


others remain, beyond all local and racial differences, 
Germans, Frenchmen, Americans. A central and per- 
manent approach to an outer and inner norm, type, 
group of characteristics persists. Wherever the per- 
ception of this plain fact is not artificially inhibited, it 
is as potent as ever. The few remaining Marranos of 
Spain, Spanish and outwardly Catholic for over four 
centuries, have applied to the Chief Rabbinate of Je- 
rusalem for formal readmittance to Jewry; a Bedouin 
tribe of Trans-Jordania remembers its Jewish origin; 
the dark, small Yemenites from farthest Arabia, the 
gorgeous Bokharans, the scattered remnants of Persia, 
Tunis, Babylon, Caucasia have all remembered, have 
all persisted. We have been a people. Weare.... 


Tit 


We are a people. This is the potent fact which 
our American assimilationist is tempted to deny. And 
his denial is often quite sincere. For the content of 
his consciousness is completely Western, completely 
American. But there is that consciousness itself; there 
are the instincts with which one grasps the world of 
appearances. ‘That consciousness, those instincts are 
shaped in each human being by the experience of his 
kind, his people. The subconsciousness of our assimi- 
lationist has not forgotten exile and terror, the knife, 
the fagot, the long days in the house of study, the 
exclusion of the menacing external world, the isolation, 
the Messianic hope. Like any Bocher in the Polish 
Ghetto of today he is precocious, intellectually pas- 
sionate, incapable of moral compromise—almost scoun- 

[85] 


ISRAEL 


drel or almost saint—given to dreams and schemes of 
world betterment, choked with inhibitions, anxieties, 
uncertainties. . . . He assimilated? Has he ever really 
envisaged the members of his football team at college? 
H{as he ever grasped that happy, pagan ease, that at- 
homeness in Zion, that uninhibited straightness of in- 
stinctive activities, that blithe and natural acceptance 
of this gaudy, brave, foolish, maddening, lovable world 
of flivvers and flirting and cutting classes, of rooting 
and loyalty and play? Why was he active in scien- 
tific or literary clubs, madly ambitious intellectually, 
earnest about world-reform? And if he took the last 
step, if he himself played football, was it not an antic- 
ipatory gesture against the reproach of Jewish physi- 
cal sloth? 

He cannot shake off the impress of the experience 
of seventy generations. Seventy generations. Let him 
once reflect on the racial and national experience of 
the fathers of the captain of his football team, then on 
that of his own fathers and on the relations of the 
two. The point is too simple to be labored. It is 
assimilation that would be the miracle, the break in 
the eternal chain of causality. . . . Our assimilationist 
may never think a Jewish thought or read. .a Jewish 
book. In the essential character of all his passions 
as well as of all his actions he remains a Jew. .. . The 
groundwork of Jewish character is his; the terrible 
post-exilic experience is his; he remains a strange mix- 
ture of passionate prophet and beaten cur, leader and 
outcast. If he has forgotten the call to “restore the 
preserved of Israel,” le throws himself into the busi- 
ness of giving “a light to the Gentiles.” He is liberal, 

[ 36 ] 


OTs OR) ave: Wiis ‘T 


reformer, practitioner or patron of the arts; he makes 
discoveries in medicine or, as a lawyer, pleads the causes 
of those for whom none will plead. If he does none 
of these things he is a sordid scoundrel. But the sordid 
scoundrels are a minority. ‘The average decent Jew 
in business, in the professions, in journalism or the 
arts sustains a perceptible relation to the prophets of 
bisipeaplesy 4.0 

Despite himself, then, the assimilationist is a Jew 
by character and by national experience. Nor must it 
be forgotten, though he himself tries eagerly to forget 
it, that the nature of the national experience has under- 
gone no essential but only accidental change. I ven- 
ture the assertion that there is today in the entire 
Aryan world no recognizable Jew who in his child- 
hood, in street or school, has not been taunted with 
his Jewishness, made by some slight, gesture, word, to 
feel excluded and inferior and has not thus received 
a spiritual wound that is incurable. Incurable by him- 
self, incurable by his fellows, incurable by Gentile 
friendship, kindness, respect, cooperation, love. An in- 
ner censor may try to force that moment of childhood 
into forgetfulness. Its imprint remains. From it 
arises the compensatory eagerness for success; from it 
are born artists, reformers, financiers; from it arise the 
fervor of poets, the generosity of philanthropists, the 
prodigality of the vulgar, the mercilessness of the usurer 
—all those imperious and exorbitant extremes to which, 
for both good and ill, the Jew is prone. Since he can- 
not be an equal, it is his will to become superior to 
the mass of men. Only irresistible brute violence can 
make a slave of him. 

[ 37 ] 


ISRAEL 


Nor is that childhood moment and its consequences 
the only unchanged element in the national experience. 
The invitation to assimilate in every respect except the 
narrowly religious which has been extended to the Jew 
in Western Europe and America is in itself not sin- 
cere. I do not mean that it is consciously hypocritical. 
Nor do I forget those thousands of liberals, especially 
in America, who would welcome Jewish assimilation. 
The nation as a whole, while demanding: assimilation, 
resists it. Were the invitation to assimilate sincere, 
schools, colleges, societies, associations, clubs, legisla- 
tures could not be too full of Jews to please non-Jewish 
Americans. The minority’s fullest and most unrestricted 
codperation in the national life would be welcomed. For 
the measure of that codperation would be the measure of 
the Jew’s Americanism. But I have only to state the 
necessary consequences of a sincere invitation to as- 
similate, to expose the absurdity of its present preten- 
sions. As the world is constituted today no majority 
desires minority assimilation; it desires minority servi- 
tude. It wants uniformity of taste, character, instinct 
in the national life, not multiformity. It wants minori- 
ties to keep quiet, obedient, unobtrusive and to fight 
for the meager privilege of remaining so in case the 
country goes to war. Thus, to take an amusing but 
symbolical instance, a critic like Stuart P. Sherman, 
who, in a manner so well-bred yet so decisive, deprecates 
the Jewish codperation in American thought and let- 
ters would be the first to tell Jewish thinkers and writers 
at the appropriate moment that it is lovely and be- 
coming to die for the fatherland.... 

No, assimilation is impossible. It is impossible be- 

[ 38 | 


OUT OF THE WEST 


cause the Jew cannot change his national character; 
he cannot, by wishing it, abandon himself any more 
than the members of any other folk can do so. It 
is impossible, also, because time cannot be turned back, 
history re-lived, the Jew permitted to share the na- 
tional experiences of the peoples among whom he has 
lived for so many centuries. He is the product today 
of the impact of millennial experiences upon his original 
character. Were the invitation to assimilate sincere, 
were the Jew to be permitted really to share the na- 
tional life and experiences of the American people for 
ten centuries, or five, or three—a different story might 
be told. In a nationalistic, war-like world that suppo- 
sition is, even for America, chimerical and absurd. 

I repeat: even for America. It would be profoundly 
unjust and uncritical not to differentiate America in 
fact if not alas, in ultimate spirit, from all other lands. 
Upon this soil no Jewish blood has flowed; in these 
cities no Ghettos have stood nor have their market- 
places known the crackle of fagots or the cry of the 
despairing of Israel. Here alone citizenship was won 
without humiliating delay and tedious struggle; here as 
recently as the day of the Russian massacres of 1903 
a whole nation embraced the distress of Israel as though 
that distress were its own, and the chief magistrate of 
the republic caused the record of that sympathy to be 
embodied in the archives of the nation. Yet that chief 
magistrate, Theodore Roosevelt, would have been the 
first to demand complete assimilation and regimentation 
for the sake of solidarity in war as the first duty of 
the American Jew. It is the inheritor of his tradition 
who today demands the obliteration of all national and 

[ 39 | 


ISRAEL 


cultural differences in the country in the service of the 
absolute sovereignty of the belligerent state. It is he, 
too, who framed those monstrous immigration laws 
which belie the past of America and in fact, if not in 
theory, accept the race doctrines of the vulgar anti- 
Semite. 

Thus the position of the American Jew is one of 
peculiar difficulty today. For several generations he 
thought that in America there had appeared a land 
which at last answered the notions of human justice 
and mercy laid down in the Torah long ago. “Ye 
shall have one manner of law, as well for the sojourner 
as for the homeborn. . . . Judge righteously between 
a man and his brother, and the sojourner that is with 
him, . . . Love ye therefore the sojourner.” The poli- 
ties of Europe never, historically at least, made such 
pretensions. America made them and made them, dur- 
ing a certain period, with all possible sincerity and 
truth. 

With considerable suddenness the American Jew 
finds all that changed. An impossible assimilation is 
demanded of him. As a reward he is offered citizen- 
ship of the second class, a citizenship with handicaps, 
reservations, social repressions and exclusions. Less 
than what had once been given him as his right is now 
grudgingly offered him as a favor. The facts have 
not changed so much as the spirit. He is regarded with 
suspicion; he is tolerated; he is reproved; he is ques- 
tioned. He is blamed for being himself, which is pre- 
cisely what, in America, he ought to have had a chance 
to be. His talents no less than his faults are made a 
cause for reproach. The stupid old myth of Jewish 

[ 40 | 


OUT OF THE WEST 


conspiracies is whispered about at the corners of cities 
and villages. ‘The most pacific and unorganized of 
peoples becomes an object of fear to the ignorant and 
the envious. The step from fear to hate is short... . 

No wonder that the American assimilationist is a 
little frantic today. ‘The national experience of the 
ages is renewed; it rises into his consciousness; he finds 
the armor of his assimilatory self grow brittle and crack. 
What shall he do? Whither shall he turn? He tries 
all the old methods. He does not know that they 
have been tried a thousand times to no purpose. He 
says he is a mere sectary; he becomes an Ethical Cul- 
turist; he attends the Unitarian churches. There is, of 
course, no reason why he should not do either. He 
is a Jew. He remains a Jew. The majority has dis- 
covered the fact, as it always does sooner or later; he 
discovers it too. Gentile and Jew find that there is 
no escape. Both believed in escape. ‘There is none. 
PN Tee 

The best and noblest among both Gentiles and Jews 
are deceived into believing that an escape exists. They 
are deceived because they need none. They dwell to- 
gether in unity, accepting each other as they are, seek- 
ing in each other not likeness but complementary dif- 
ference, seeking from each other not imitation or sub- 
servience but light and fire. That small and luminous 
world in which Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, 
Gerhart Hauptmann and Jakob Wassermann and many 
others of less fame in many lands dwell together knows 
Gentile and Jew but as the name of the two equal 
paths toward the City of God which both seek to build. 
I trust that that company of the elect prefigures the 

[41 ] 


ISRAEL 


world of the future and is the living symbol of that 
world. But we are here amid primitive fears, myths, 
passions, conflicts. And in this dust and heat there 
is no escape, there is no hiding. There is acceptance, 
creative acceptance of the fate decreed. Only through 
such acceptance can we bring nearer by the breadth of 
a hair the coming of another world and hasten the 
march of the inevitable centuries between that world 
and our own troubled day. . . 


IV 


In my last travels about America, I saw Jews in 
many cities. I spoke with many men and women. 
Most of them were unhappy and disturbed and uncer- 
tain of themselves. They felt the subtle coming of 
an unaccustomed atmosphere. I heard no words more 
frequently than these: “It was not so when we went 
to school or college.” 

T heard: 

“Tt is difficult to build a house in a Gentile neigh- 
borhood. If you call on new neighbors, as of course 
you want to do, you risk being insulted. But if you 
don’t you may be missing very charming people and 
they may think you exclusive and unneighborly. .. .” 

An eminent surgeon said: 

“Yes, the University Club elected me to membership 
the other day. But I didn’t accept. I’m the only Jew 
they’ve elected and I know they intend to elect no 
other. I don’t want, in the first place, to be anybody’s 


pet Jew, and I certainly won’t furnish the club with 
[ 42 | 


OUT OR VTHE WEST 


the argument it wants to refute the perfectly correct 
charge of bitter though polite anti-Semitism.” 

At dinner in a dining-car opposite me a gentleman 
of sixty-odd. Very well preserved. Rosy and clean- 
shaven. Close-cropped white hair. Gold-rimmed 
spectacles. Wealthy. Charitable. Yiddish accent al- 
most gone from his English. Slightly suspicious “r’s” 
and “‘th’s.”’ 

“T think there is no difficulty at all. I have always 
had faith in the good sense of the American people. 
I have lived in my city for forty years and I have 
many Gentile friends including the Catholic Bishop of 
the diocese. . . . On my sixtieth birthday they gave 
me a public dinner in appreciation of what I had done 
for our city. The Bishop presided and spoke of the 
help I had given him toward re-decorating his Cathe- 
dral. He said: ‘Our Brother Solberg here is an ex- 
ample of Jewish citizenship. . . .’ There were several 
prominent Protestant ministers present, too. ... If 
things are not always as nice as they were—I’m not 
prepared to admit it—but if they are not, it is be- 
cause people do foolish things. Right now in my city 
there’s a young Jewish boy, a lawyer, very brilliant 
fellow. Well, instead of building up a fine practice—he 
could do it easy; I am ready to turn over some real- 
estate transfers to him. Instead of doing that, he has 
to run for office on a radical ticket with a bunch of 
radicals. He wants to clean up city politics; he wants 
to stop graft; he wants, well—how should I know? 
Naturally people don’t like it. They say: ‘Why should 
a Jew tell us what to do” Of course, that’s foolish- 
ness, too. But why should we put ourselves forward 

[ 43 ] 


ISRAEL 


that way and hurt people’s feelings? Graft! There 
always has been graft, there always will be graft. As 
I said to that young fellow: ‘You have an idea what 
I’m worth and you know, too, there isn’t a member 
of this community, Jew or Gentile, that wouldn’t say 
a good word for me. Well, I didn’t get where I am 
today by mixing into other people’s business. Think 
of your wife and your fine little children... .’ And 
do you know what he answered me? He said: ‘Mr. 
Solberg, mind you, I’m not a Zionist; but you—youw’re 
enough to make a radical Zionist out of the rabbi 
of a reformed millionaire congregation! You see? 
First he comes with one kind of foolishness and then 
with Zionism, another kind of foolishness. What can 
you expect?” 

In a southwestern city I met an elderly couple. They 
were very well-bred and kindly people. And they were 
half-heartedly looking for a house. They told me that 
it was cheaper to buy than to rent one. But they hadn’t 
somehow the heart to buy. ‘They had spent the greater 
part of their lives in a small southern town and had 
brought up their children there and had been neigh- 
borly with everyone. But in recent years, they said, 
a new spirit had come over the town. Old friends and 
acquaintances had turned against them, had begun to 
view them with suspicion and a strange kind of fear, 
and the condition, intangible enough but intensely real 
just the same, had gone so far that they no longer 
felt at home in that town and had sold the house in 
which all their children were born and had come to 
this city in which one of their sons lived and in which 
there was a powerful Jewish community. Yet they 

[ 44 ] 


OO TO Beste EoOW EST 


didn’t feel at home here either. They were too old to 
be uprooted. ... 

I met reformed rabbis who belonged to the ministerial 
unions of their communities and were hectically opti- 
mistic, and isolated, ironical Zionists who were teased 
and “kidded” by their friends and acquaintances. I 
met an eminent physician, a man of grave character 
and profound philosophic culture who told me that his 
young son was having his first rude contact with the 
world at Williams College—was getting the first bitter 
taste of slights, exclusions, humiliations. And every- 
where I found minds touched with anxiety and a deep 
though rather helpless preoccupation with this persistent 
problem: this problem of the Jew’s relation both to 
the world and to himself. I heard a thousand subtle 
and a thousand clever and ironical observations. But 
all that I heard was curiously negative in its character. 
And I saw many ways in which people, by the trickery 
of psychical substitution, tried to get a temporary re- 
lief from this great preoccupation. ‘They interested 
themselves in good causes, in Negro welfare, in the 
reform of education. But, though they were not con- 
scious of the fact, these causes were to them only ways 
of escape. And nowhere did I meet—though this may 
have been ill-luck—between New York and St. Louis, 
between Dallas and Detroit any group of Jews, how- 
ever small, who said: We are Jews and can be nothing 
else and thus it is as Jews that we must make our 
contribution to American civilization. .. . 

I did not, on the other hand—though this may also 
have been a matter of luck—meet with the fury of 
assimilationism which later, with a strange suddenness, 


[45 ] 


ISRAEL 


met me in a London drawing-room where a lady with 
the mien and ancestral passion of a Hebrew prophetess 
told me that she was an Englishwoman, nothing but 
an Englishwoman, as her ancestors had been since the 
days of Cromwell, that all continental Jews were for- 
elgners to her precisely as continental Protestants 
were foreigners to decent English people of the Prot- 
estant persuasion, that her little boy at Winchester 
—or was it Charterhouse—was doing, being, feeling 
precisely as other little English boys had done for 
four hundred years, that horrid persons like myself 
would end by forcing all self-respecting English Jews 
to change their religion and that she was a Dame of 
the Primrose League. She forgot to mention the name 
of the League’s founder; she would not discuss the 
political or social position of her ancestors between the 
re-settlement and the Reform Bills. ... 

Up the Thames we steamed—famous and exquisite 
stream. Houses on the shore, set in gardens of in- 
numerable flowers, flowers as perfect, as precise as 
jewels. Everywhere brilliancy and sobriety, comfort 
and assurance—an assurance, an historic rootedness, an 
easy familiarity with power and dominion so high, so 
remote from danger or self-distrust that it can afford 
to tolerate, to patronize, to soothe the handful of Jews 
that share its cities and countrysides. A grand seigneur 
can pick what friends he pleases; the upstart is more 
CALeTUL toi. 

Eton College. A classroom occupied since 1480 with 
bits of yesterday’s Latin prose-composition still on the 
wooden blackboard. . . . Next the chapel with its glow 
and splendor, with flags from the great war, with 

[ 46 ] 


OUT OF THE WEST 


memorials of all the long list of England’s wars, con- 
quests, triumphs, with busts of her statesmen, war- 
riors, with that carved motto which makes one glance 
suddenly at the lonely bust of Shelley among these 
other strong, victorious people, the motto: Vincet Amor 
Paine... 

A scene of more than Roman dignity, symbol of a 
world of more than Roman splendor. As pagan as 
Rome, as far from peace which is salvation as Rome— 
still alienated from the future of civilization, if civiliza- 
tion is to survive at all. ... There is, I know, another 
England, an England first in all the tasks of humanity. 
But how small is that other England and how feeble 
—a fragment of this nation of conquerors. One nation 
only is no longer pagan—one whole nation, small 
though it be. Here, more clearly than ever, I knew 
that Israel had yet a function to perform in the society 
of nations, a word to say in the councils of mankind.... 


[47] 


CHAPTER II 
CREATIVE EXILES 


I 


Tue lands of German speech are lands of violent 
and symbolica! contrasts. Berlin with its fine, tight 
severity, Berlin by tradition and in fact the most cere- 
bral city of Europe permitted itself for centuries to 
be the backyard of the Hohenzollern. The Berliners 
laughed quietly at the pompous and absurd Siegesallee, 
but were pleased at titles strewn by an opera bouffe 
emperor. . . . Vienna, the freest and most poetical of 
cities, Vienna whose music, grace and wit still charm 
the world, is black with clericalism, soaked in incense 
to the bone. The Viennese will talk and write and 
compose divinely. At the moment of action they col- 
lapse before the bearers of gross and obvious super- 
stition. ... 

Germany missed the Renaissance, and nearly per- 
ished in the Thirty Years’ War instead. She missed 
the great critical eighteenth century. Lessing was ad- 
mirable, but Lessing did not suffice. Romanticism en- 
gulfed her; romanticism engulfs her people still. Mil- 
hons of today sing folk-songs to the sounds of the lute. 
It is adorable. But it does not make for a conquest 
of the world as object. ... The Tiergarten is the 
most idyllic of parks. You lose yourself in those glades 
and dream beside the groves and quiet waters. A 
Hyde Park tumult is unimaginable here. It is even 

[ 48 ] 


CREATIVE EXILES 


more unimaginable among the hills and forests of the 
Wiener Wald. At all seasons the Viennese wander 
forth into the open and sing and discuss and dream.... 

The loftiest philosophies are born in Germany and 
the silliest theories. Chamberlain is as famous as 
Eucken. High scientific achievement is not always ac- 
companied by the scientific temper. For one Rudolf 
Virchow there are always dozens of men who, eminent 
in their special sciences, are royalists, reactionaries, anti- 
Semites as men and citizens. In German literature 
these contrasts tend to disappear. The divine lyrical 
literature of eight centuries is almost wholly subjective, 
the high drama is philosophic and universal, the tale is 
idyllic. When, in the nineteenth century, reason and 
objectivity begin to assert themselves, they do so in cities 
and circles where the Jewish influence is strong. Jewish 
writers helped to shape this newer literature, Jewish 
critics defended it, Jewish audiences accepted it, Jewish 
publishers printed it. The proclaimers of many of the 
most solid reputations of the nineteenth century were 
Jews. It was so in the case of Hebbel, of Hauptmann, 
of Stefan George. The anti-Semites are quite right: 
modern German literature is “verjudet.” From the 
days of Heine and Borne on German literature and 
art have been under a critical and creative Jewish in- 
fluence which is out of all proportion to the Jewish 
population. . 

Germany is nthe classical land of J ati assimilation; 
it is the classical land of anti-Semitism. Here, in truth, 
anti-Semitism was invented. For it is unhistorical to 
speak of anti-Semitism as existing prior to the middle 
of the nineteenth century. Before that the Jew was 

[ 49 ] 


ISRAEL 


an outcast because he was a stranger and an unbeliever. 
He was a ghastly Oriental; he had killed Christ. How 
should he not be suspected of evil, of poison and black 
magic in a world of magic and miracle? How could he 
be the subject of kings and princes when subject and 
Christian were, in the very structure of things, con- 
vertible terms? His enforced isolation was like the 
isolation of disease; his destruction was pleasing to God 
and the church.... 

This theory did not disappear with the French Revo- 
lution. For years after the Reform Bills it was debated 
in England whether a non-Christian could hold public 
office in a Christian state. The theory of the Christian 
State appears uninterruptedly in those long years of 
struggle, from 1812 to 1848, during which the Jews of 
Germany fought for the recognition of their civil rights. 
Nor can that theory be said to be entirely dead today. 
It is no longer held officially: it lingers in the conscious- 
ness of thousands everywhere. 

Once governments abandoned that theory, however, 
there was no longer any respectable excuse for continu- 
ing the civil disabilities of the Jews. First physical iso- 
lation was discontinued. The Ghettos opened. Next 
Jewish marriages were freed from intolerable restriction 
and the people could increase normally. Last came—at 
least on paper—the freedom of trades, professions, 
offices. 

The process was a long one. In Germany it lasted 
from the days of Moses Mendelssohn practically until 
the Franco-Prussian War. But all during that period 
the assimilatory tendencies in German Jewry were 
extraordinarily powerful. Whether it was because the 

[ 50 | 


CREATIVE EXILES 


Jewish masses had for centuries spoken a German dia- 
lect, or whether the blending of lyrical subjectivity with 
dialectic subtlety and the essential musicalness of Ger- 
man culture made a special appeal to the Jewish soul, 
the fact remains that Jewish assimilation was effortless 
and profound. I do not speak of the vulgar practice 
of baptism for the sake of security or preferment, nor 
of the vulgar escape of the mere renegade. With an 
instinctive passion the Jews of Germany accepted the 
modern theory of the nationalistic state, consented to 
consider themselves a mere body of religious sectaries, 
modernized and Germanized their liturgy, ritual, mode 
of life and became the most active co-workers in the 
task of German civilization. On a thousand occasions 
and in the course of a thousand controversies they 
asserted that they were Germans, one-hundred-per-cent 
Germans of Jewish faith, and did indeed live and on a 
hundred fields of battle die for their fatherland. 

Here, if anywhere, the Gentile invitation to assimilate, 
to become part of the nation and of the national culture 
was accepted. Here was the classical land of assimila- 
tion. And in this land arose the modern anti-Semitic 
movement and the theory which, for the obvious purpose 
of excluding Jewry from the work and the councils of 
the nation, substituted the Aryan or Nordic for the 
old-fashioned Christian State. Between the fear that 
the Jew will damn the Christian soul and the fear that 
the Semite will contaminate the Aryan mind the differ- 
ence is small. 

From its humble beginnings in the “Anti-Semitic 
League,” the movement grew and was gradually or- 
ganized. The protests of men like Virchow and Momm- 


[51 ] 


ISRAEL 


sen availed little. A largely Gentile “Society for Com- 
bating Anti-Semitism” proved equally ineffective. A 
political party was founded and at one time there were 
thirteen officially anti-Semitic members in the Reichs- 
tag. There arose a distinctly anti-Semitic press, an 
anti-Semitic method of rewriting history, not excluding 
the history of the Old Testament. Under the influence 
of the unfounded declamations of Houston Stewart 
Chamberlain, a determined effort was made to prove 
that the lost inhabitants of the kingdom of Israel were 
not “Jews” at all, that the “Jews” were an alien and a 
wicked tribe who had destroyed the lofty Israelitish 
civilization and who were at their work of destruction 
still. Needless to say that Gentile Semitologists com- 
batted this folly vigorously.” The half-instructed crowd 
continued to harbor this as well as other absurdities in 
order to justify its actual aversion to Jewish life and 
character. 

The sport of pseudo-philosophical Jew-baiting 
reached its height between 1880 and 1900. It was in 
the former year that in France, too, pamphlets began 
to appear with the familiar names: L’Anti-Juif, L’An- 
ti-sémitique. From these it was but one step to the dis- 
covery that the defeat of France at the hands of Prussia 
was due to Jewish influence: Le Juif—voila l Knnemi. 
In 1886 the notorious Edouard Drumont in a long and 
laborious book summed up the theory that all the his- 
torical ills of the French nation from the Middle Ages 
on were due to Jewish wickedness: La France Juive. 
With true French logicalness and hysteria, a group of 
deputies proposed the expulsion of the Jews from 


1 Eduard Koenig: Das Antisemitische Hauptdogma. Bonn: 1914. 
[ 52 | 


CREATIVE EXILES 


France. Such was the prologue to the Dreyfus contro- 
versy. With an open shamelessness unequaled in West- 
ern Kurope the French nation pursued its helpless prey 
from the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus in 1894 to his 
final acquittal in 1906.... 

The handful of French Jews bowed before the storm. 
In Germany, although the Jews never numbered more 
than one one-hundredth of the total population, they 
dwelt in a few compact masses; they were not without 
influence; they had creatively mastered the culture of 
their step-fatherland. Their inner alliance with German 
civilization was so profound that their instinctive answer 
to the anti-Semitic movement was deeper and closer 
assimilation. In 1895, Jews constituted one-tenth of the 
student body of the German universities. Hence ten 
times as many Jews proportionately sought the highest 
cultural training as their Gentile neighbors. In spite of 
a thousand obstacles, in spite of much public insult and 
much private chagrin the intense assimilatory effort of 
German Jewry produced a series of personalities so 
commanding that before them all but the dregs of the 
anti-Semitic rabble fell silent: Walther Rathenau, Paul 
Ehrlich, Gustav Mahler, Max Liebermann, Jakob Was- 
sermann, Albert Einstein.... 

The tragedy of German assimilationism. ... Here is 
a book before me: Die Frau in Traum (19138), by Her- 
mann Levy. I do not know who Hermann Levy is. But 
his name tells a part of his story. In the assimilatory 
families under the empire, the children were given na- 
tionalistic German names: Hermann, Kurt, Ludwig, 
Hans.... The book, Die Frau in Traum, is a book of 
verses. ‘The verses are not highly original. But they 

[ 53 | 


ISRAEL 


are exquisite. They master the intricate and astonishing 
wordcraft of George and Rilke from within; they are 
profoundly musical. 'To this poet the language in which 
he wrote, was not a garment. With all its memories, 
associations, overtones, it had become interwoven into 
the very texture of his being. Germany had become the 
home of his spirit; the Christian-European past had 
become the past of his imagination. He wrote in cele- 
bration of the Madonna. ... But his name was not only 
Hermann; it was Levy. At school it was often pro- 
nounced with an old, old gesture of humorous con- 
tempt. ... At the university Levy was not received 
into the fraternities founded by the authentic sons of 
Hermann, the Cheruscan.... Any Schmidt or Mueller 
who could not speak the native tongue with either grace 
or correctness esteemed himself at bottom the superior 
of this Jew. ... Half of the careers open to Schmidt 
and Mueller were closed to Levy. Not officially, of 
course, but in fact. He could write poetry. For whom? 
The average Aryan lover of poetry would say: German 
poetry? By Levy? I wonder.... 

Does this sound strange to American ears? Does it 
sound strange to the ears of the generation that is now 
at college, that is now entering upon life? Mary Austin 
has told me that I must not write about love for Ameri- 
cans, since my racial experience of the matter is alien; 
Brander Matthews announced in the Times that after 
all, a Jew like myself could not be expected to write 
sound English; Stuart Sherman is concerned, like Adolf 
Bartels, for the Nordic integrity of our cultural life. 
The story of German assimilation is a parable... . 


During the World War many songs were written 
[ 54 | 


CREATIVE EXILES 


and sung in Germany and Austria. But the most 
haunting of all was the Austrian Cavalry Song by a 
young Jewish advocate of Vienna named Hugo Zucker- 
mann who rode forth with the riders of his country 
and fell somewhere in the Carpathians. Today that 
song which once many thousands were singing is for- 
gotten. ... In August, 1924, there was conducted in 
Berlin a memorial service for those who had fallen in 
the War. The sliest as well as the grossest chicanery 
was used to exclude a rabbi from the services. The 
twelve thousand Jews who had fallen were not publicly 
remembered, «03 % 

Zuckermann, as his posthumous poems show, was not 
entirely the dupe of the assimilatory process. He 
fought with conviction against the Russia of Plehve 
and of the massacres of Kishinev. His poems have the 
brevity and laconic plangency of the best German folk- 
songs. But they speak of a Jewish fate and a Jewish 
soul and reach their highest note in an ode. concerning 
the rebuilding of Zion. Zuckermann was duped in 
another fashion. In war the nations want solidarity and 
aid at any price. When the German armies overran 
Poland the high command issued an appeal in Yiddish 
to the Jews of that unhappy country: “Our flags bring 
you justice and liberty and equal rights, religious free- 
dom, liberty to work undisturbed in all departments 
of both the economic and the cultural life in your own 
spirit. ‘Too long have you groaned under the iron 
yoke of the Muscovite. . . . Clear our road to defeat 
the enemy and bring the victory of liberty and jus- 
tice!” The appeal was signed by Ludendorff. And 
it is admitted in Poland that the German armies were 

[ 55 | 


ISRAEL 


humane and not unregardful of either the security or 
the sensibilities of the Jews. But when the war was 
over the party of Ludendorff murdered Rathenau, con- 
spired with Hitler and the knights of the Hooked Cross 
and tried to drive Jewish professors from their lecture 
halls. Hugo Zuckermann is silent among the twelve 
thousand uncommemorated dead. 


II 


I have said that the story of German assimilationism 
is a parable. It illustrates for the past and for the fu- 
ture all phases of this matter which seems so intricate 
and subtle and is, in point of fact, so tragically plain. 
The majority says: Be like us and we shall be brothers 
and equals. ‘The minority accepts the invitation. It 
seeks to forget its blood, past, traditions, experiences, 
both historical and personal. It seeks to merge wholly 
with the nation upon whose soil it lives. Then comes 
a fine day on which the majority discovers that its invi- 
. tation has not been wholly accepted in one respect and 
far too well in another. ‘Thus it was found in Ger- 
many that the Jews remained Jews even when they 
were most German; it was found in addition that the 
Jew, to speak plainly and grossly, could beat the Ger- 
man at his own game. If we were a stupid people 
there would be no Jewish problem. : There was never 
more than one Jew to every one hundred Germans. 
The Jews control the most influential sections of the 
press; they control the theaters; they produce nearly 
half of the sound literature written in the German 
tongue ... and remain Jews. Yes, for it is their 
Jewishness that makes of them by preference, leaders 

[ 56 | 


CREATIVE EXILES 


of opinion, teachers, scholars, poets. We are the people 
of the book, the people of the mind. History has 
forced us to do without land, power, adventure in the 
physical world. It has forced us to the conquest of 
what is not made with hands. . . . The majority’s an- 
swer to this necessary process and its results is modern 
anti-Semitism. 

In America there are about three millions of Jews. 
Most of them are recent emigrants from the East of 
Europe and the children of these people who came 
in great waves after the Russian massacres of the late 
nineteenth century. ‘They have not had time to be- 
come assimilated, nor did they find here, as they did 
in Germany, a compact, ripe and kindred culture. Yet 
already our universities are sharply on the defensive, 
Jewish influence in the press, in the theater, in music 
is being deprecated and the conservative critics of lit- 
erature have raised a warning cry. We do not dis- 
appear; we cannot commit national suicide; we remain 
Jews. Remaining Jews we operate with our minds 
and seek to master our world from within. Therefore 
the majority cries to us, Become Americans, and yet 
resists the process it demands. In twenty-five, in fifty 
years at most we shall, if the present confusions of the 
world continue, have a situation in America that re- 
sembles the German situation at all points. 

One must understand the anti-Semite. In Germany 
it is not hard to understand him. Huis myths of race 
or of Jewish conspiracies are merely attempts to ra- 
tionalize his position. Neither Adolf Hitler, nor 
Henry Ford nor even Hilaire Belloc dares quite face 
his actual dilemma. They are, in essence, primitive 

[ 57 ] 


ISRAEL 


men and hence absolutists. They feel secure only 
within the limits of a compact and war-like tribe with 
uniform perceptions, tastes, mores. These perceptions, 
tastes, mores are to them emotional absolutes. Differ- 
ent perceptions, tastes and mores they desire to see 
confined to alien tribes whom they can hate and with 
whom they can wage war. Now these men find neigh- 
bors and fellow citizens who are different from them- 
selves. Not violently different. The differences are 
profound and subtle. And the central difference is 
this, that these others despise force. ‘The best among 
them disregard it wholly, the worse meet it with guile. 
But since there is nothing so futile as force, nothing 
so negative, nothing so purely destructive and primor- 
dial, it follows that in a highly organized society these 
strange people whom long historic experiences have en- 
lightened as to the nature of force, function upon the 
whole well and successfully. Thus the anti-Semite, the 
natural man who lives by his prejudices, passions, super- 
stitious fears, is put out, puzzled, angry. He has an 
unfair competitor. And he is quite right. He has. 
He and his ancestors used force against the Jews. And 
force did not prevail. It taught the Jew the uses and 
powers of the unconquerable mind. Genius, so far 
as we know, is accident. But the anti-Semite, the nat- 
ural, primitive man, never thinks of this explanation. 
He still worships force and thinks that it can prevail. 
Hence to him the Jew is uncanny. He dreams of con- 
spiracies, like Henry Ford, or of racial Utopias, like 
Adolf Bartels or, like Hilaire Belloc who has a 
strange, contorted perception of the truth, clamors for 
the old Ghetto and the violent elimination of the Jew 
[ 58 | 


CREATIVE EXILES 


from normal society. . . . And the one thing that never 
occurs to the nations is that if they, too, would learn 
to despise force and temper the essential levity of their 
way of life with practical moral earnestness, the little 
people of the Jews would trouble them no more... . 

In Germany the struggle and the misunderstanding 
began long ago. ‘The Jews did not wait for emanci- 
pation. They fell in love with the culture of Ger- 
many at a period when, at some German frontiers, they 
had still to pay the same fee that was charged for heads 
of cattle. . . . The fathers and brothers of Rahel and 
the other famous Jewesses of the Romantic period had 
no civic rights. Heine escaped the Ghetto through the 
accident of Napoleon’s presence on the Rhine; Ludwig 
Borne passed his childhood in the stifling Ghetto of 
Frankfort. There were constant promises of emanci- 
pation. These promises were not kept. What was 
demanded as a preliminary to the granting of the most 
partial liberties was assimilation, Germanization. 

The Jews were ready to respond to that demand in 
the lower as well as in the higher sense. Christian 
baptism for social or professional reasons became epi- 
demic. But at the same time there began that Jewish 
cooperation in the literature, art and thought of Ger- 
many which is so important in itself and so significant 
of the precise character of the Jew and the Jewish 
problem everywhere. 

These people had suffered. They desired to build 
a better world—passionately like Ferdinand Lassalle, 
through the cold operations of the mind like Karl Marx. 
They had been silenced and desired to speak out. In 
the stories of Leopold Kompert, in the weightier fic- 

[ 59 | 


ISRAEL 


tions of Karl Emil Franzos there is the expression of 
the impassioned yearning for Europe. In the stories 
and novels of Berthold Auerbach there is no longer 
flight. There is an attempt at complete identification 
with the life of the German folk. The poets, novelists, 
scholars, scientists who arose thereafter had, with their 
conscious minds, cut themselves off from the history 
and spirit of their people and threw themselves pas- 
sionately into the work of German civilization. 

An odd ana fascinating book could be written on 
the Jews ir. German literature and science—on the 
profound completeness of their acceptance of the invi- 
tation to become one with the very soul of the German 
people. Even when they came from the border prov- 
inces of the Kast, what their hearts heard was the magic 
of German speech and song. An old Jew from Aus- 
trian Silesia, Heinrich Landesmann (Hieronymus 
Lorm), blind and palsied and in great poverty, wrote 
some of the most authentic poetry of his period. From 
the compact Ghetto regions, too, came later poets like 
Jakob Julius David and Hugo Salus and Adolf 
Donath. Germany shone like a sun upon the border- 
lands. Arthur Schnitzler’s grandfather was an illiterate 
carpenter in Hungary. | 

I can give only indications. It would be beyond 
the purpose of this book to give more. For a complete 
account of Jewish authorship in German one must read 
the books of the professional anti-Semites who seek 
to show how the worm of Jewish influence is gnawing 
away the foundations of their Nordic temple. They 
seek to show, too, how their greatest artists must be 
distrusted. or all these are “verjudet.” The dead 

[ 60 ] 


CREATIVE EXILES 


Richard Dehmel and the living Hermann Hesse and 
Thomas Mann and Gerhart Hauptmann are all to be 
suspected and almost to be shunned. They have Jew- 
ish wives or, at the least, Jewish friends, critics, biog- 
Pagers t.''s 

Jewish codperation becomes most active, of course, 
with the beginning of the modern movements in litera- 
ture. Next to the name of Hauptmann stands that 
of Schnitzler. The critics who proclaimed and the di- 
rectors who nurtured the great new drama were nearly 
all Jews. Arthur Eloesser and Julius Bab and Alfred 
Kerr are still the leaders of dramatic criticism and Otto 
Brahm who created the naturalistic art of the theater 
was followed by the creators of the neo-romantic and 
expressionistic theaters: Max Reinhardt and Leopold 
Jessner. Minor dramatists like Georg Hirschfeld and 
Ludwig Fulda did not fulfill the promise of their 
youth. Protest and gesture were of no avail. Gentile 
enmity, resistance, estrangement robbed them of the 
stuff of art. When Hirschfeld had written of what he 
knew, the life of a little circle of assimilated Jews in 
Berlin and their Gentile servants, his power failed, be- 
cause his material gave out.’ A similar fate overtook 
the naturalistic novelist Georg Hermann. Schnitzler 
alone, among the direct interpreters of life in drama 
and story, escaped this gradual impoverishment. The 
vast creative energy of Jakob Wassermann transcended 
its possibility from the start. 

The rebirth of poetry, the setting-free of the imagi- 
nation, relieved the Jew of the necessity of drawing ex- 
perience from sources rarely open to him. Drama and 


1Compare, from this point of view, the works of Miss Fannie Hurst. 
61 


ISRAEL 


novel are rooted in the life of society; the poet draws 
in solitude from history, legend, universal things, the 
promptings of his own heart. Many Jews, like Leo 
Greiner, immersed later in the hard necessities of the 
world, began by adding things of deep and rich beauty 
to German poetry. Others opposed their idealism to 
life more effectually, like the eminent philosophic poet 
Alfred Mombert. Ernst Lissauer, Jewish even in his 
furious assimilationism, rose finally to “something like 
prophetic strain” in “The Eternal Pentecost.” The 
most finely balanced natures hushed or eluded the vio- 
lence of struggle and produced noble and untroubled 
poetic work. Such are the lyrist Stefan Zweig and the 
poetic dramatist Richard Beer-Hofmann. And these 
are but a few. But they suffice. A historian of the 
Jews in Germany would have much to say of their pre- 
eminent influence, within and without the universities, 
during this period, on the history of literature, of music, 
of systematic thought and would begin with such names 
as Richard Moritz Meyer, Max Friedlander, Hermann 
Cohen. 7 

I come to the immediate present. Moritz Heimann 
and Max Brod stand somewhat aside from the move- 
ments of the day. ‘These movements, under whatever 
fugitive name they go—activism, expressionism—hay- 
ing as their end the recreation of life through ‘the 
power of the spirit, are largely Jewish. ‘There are 
Sternheim and Toller in the drama, Doblin in the 
novel, Leonhard, Rubiner, Ehrenstein, Lichtenstein, 
Wolfenstein in the lyric. There is, above all, Franz 
Werfel, the most notable lyrical talent that has arisen 
in Europe for a decade. 


[ 62 ] 





CREATIVE EXILES 


These names, these facts, give but the faintest, the 
most inadequate notion of the part played by Jewry 
in the artistic and intellectual life of Germany. I have 
moved in the leading literary circles of Berlin and 
Vienna. Jews... Jews... I asked Beer-Hofmann: 
“Are there no Gentile writers in Austria?’ He 
smiled his wise, tolerant, subtle smile—half Hebrew 
prophet, half esthetic dandy of the most brilliant days 
of the Viennese literary renaissance before the war. He 
thought: “There is Rudolf Hans Bartsch; there is 
Karl Schénherr. There is... .’ He faltered. 

I do not write this in pride. I have heard no Ger- 
man or Austrian Jew speak of this matter with pride 
—with the old pride of the assimilationist which flour- 
ishes in certain sections of our American-Jewish press. 
In Germany where assimilationism made its extreme 
and ultimate effort, where the Jews, functioning ac- 
cording to their eternal nature became, out of all rea- 
sonable proportions to their number, the teachers and 
thinkers and singers and creative spirits of their new 
homeland—in Germany assimilationism is a by-word 
and an evil jest, a thing absurd and bankrupt. It was 
demanded; it was tried. The answer was anti-Semi- 
tism. ‘The answer is that today it is more difficult than 
ever for a Jew to codperate normally in the life of the 
nation. All offices, posts, functions in the state and 
the universities are made more cruelly difficult of ac- 
cess. The academic youth of the country is corrupted 
with the poison of race myths and race hatreds. The 
social division between the Gentile and the Jewish stu- 
dent is complete. The Jews live, think, create in and 


through Germany. They do so in isolation from the 
[ 63 ] 


ISRAEL 


people who consume the fruit of their labors. They 
are islanded among the surging millions whom they 
serve. . . . No wonder that many are returning to an- 
other tradition, the tradition of Leopold Zunz and 
Heinrich Graetz. For it must not be forgotten that 
Germany is the home not only of assimilationism, but 
also of modern Jewish history and philosophy. ‘To 
these poets and thinkers are returning. It is no acci- 
dent that Stefan Zweig wrote “Jeremias’ or Beer- 
Hofmann “Jakobs Traum” or that Wassermann is 
contemplating a Jewish novel. It is no accident that 
one of the most exquisite living masters of German 
prose, Martin Buber, has concerned himself wholly with 
the life and legends, the history and thought of the 
people that is his own. 


III 


To establish the fact that anti-Semitism is the an- 
swer to assimilation is not enough. Many minds among 
both Jews and Gentiles are deceived by the wave-like 
character of anti-Semitic agitation. They see the wave 
rise; they see it recede; they nurse the false hope of 
better days. They are still immersed in the ideology 
of progress which marked the nineteenth century. This 
fallacious hope is especially prevalent in the English- 
speaking world. For it is, in truth, the special glory 
of that world that Romanticism did not wholly and 
at once destroy the labors of the critical and rational — 
eighteenth century, and that men like James Mill and 
John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold and John 
Morley carried the great tradition of reason, of philo- 
sophically-grounded liberty and tolerance into our own 

[ 64 ] 


CREATIVE EXILES 


day. The greatest English Romantics did not, in fact, 
break with the eighteenth century, but, like Shelley, 
developed its thoughts to their ultimately necessary 
conclusion. Hazlitt opposed the reaction after Water- 
loo; the republican Landor lived to hand on the torch 
to Swinburne who, Aryan aristocrat and pagan, pro- 
tested in fiery verse against the slaughter of the Rus- 
sian Jews. Those days, those hopes are over. The 
sodden romanticism of myth and blood and racial na- 
tionalism has reached England, too. One has but to 
consider what Shelley or Mill would have said to Ches- 
terton and Belloc; what even Macaulay or Frederic 
Harrison would have said to the Protocols of the Elders 
of Zion. . . . The wave of anti-Semitism recedes and 
rises. We remain the playthings of the fears and furies 
of the nations. It is necessary to dismiss false hopes; 
it is more profitable to study coldly the exact character 
of the movement of that wave... . 

The first period of Jewish emancipation followed 
the French Revolution. ‘The European masses and 
minor governments resisted as stolidly and as long as 
possible. There was no medieval argument, there was 
no trickery left unused to oppose the liberation of the 
Jew. But the ideas of the French Revolution had an 
ultimate and commanding foree from which there was 
no complete withdrawal. Those ideas burned not only 
in the cities of the Continent but in the Ghettos of 
those cities too. The Jews began to demand as of 
right what hitherto they had sued for as a favor. In 
every Parliament, near every throne there were a few 
men whose reason was convinced. The actual process 
of emancipation was slow and difficult. But the spirit 

[ 65 | 


ISRAEL 


of the time worked for it. The conception of the Chris- 
tian state was dying hard. But it was dying. 

The defeat of Napoleon led to the first period of 
reaction. The Jews were deprived of the meager rights 
they had won. The superstition of legitimacy clung to 
its outposts. Jews had fought and fallen in the Ger- 
man wars of liberation even as they had done in the 
armies of Napoleon. ‘They fought for the freedom of 
Germany, hoping that their own would then be granted 
them; they fought under Napoleon, hoping for the lib- 
eralizing of the Continent.” Both hopes went down to 
disaster as all such hopes have done. Fear of being 
engulfed by the revolution led the statesmen of the 
old order to make grudging concessions. When the AI- 
lies triumphed force and superstition triumphed too. 
That triumph was brief seen in the perspective of his- 
toric time; we know now how precarious it was. It 
probably seemed neither brief nor precarious to those 
Jewish men and women, especially in Germany, who 
like the mother of Heine, had imbibed the ideas of the 
revolution, felt themselves to be thorough Europeans 
and were reduced once more to the status of despised 
and dangerous serfs. 

The July Revolution lighted the gloom of those years. 
So did the British Reform Bills. Neither one brought 
anything approaching complete emancipation to the 
Jewry of EKurope. But these events shook the security 
of the states and restrained them from excesses. Be- 
neath the surface of society the revolutionary forces 
were gathering. The year 1848 came in sight—the best 
year of all modern history, the year in which, for once, 
liberalism and reason had the upper hand and the darker 

[ 66 | 


CREATIVE EXILES 


superstitions of the ages seemed for once to be per- 
manently discredited. 

Now and only now the actual emancipation of Jewry 
set in. Now, for the first time, was issued the invita- 
tion to the Jews to become part of the nations among 
whom they lived. Now began that strange effort of 
the Jews to fulfill an impossible demand. An immoral 
demand, too, especially immoral from the point of view 
of the dozen aspiring nationalities of central and Near 
Eastern Kurope. But these nationalities regarded the 
Jews merely as a religious community; the Jews re- 
garded themselves as such. That dangerous fallacy was 
embraced by all sides. But it was, for a period, sin- 
cerely and honestly embraced. We know now with 
what results. But from 1848 to 1869 a genuine lib- 
eralism prevailed. Doors were opened everywhere. At 
least they stood ajar. Jews swarmed into the univer- 
sities. ‘They were admitted to aristocratic fraternities. 
The patriotic Jewish subject and citizen was regarded 
with favor by some, without fear and disgust by many. 

It was a period of the consolidation of power. Ger- 
many, under the leadership of Prussia, was growing 
stronger year by year. France deemed herself strong. 
The states dreamed of even greater power and that 
meant, from the point of view of the pagan Gentile 
world, conflict and triumph, war and victory. Pre- 
paring, consciously or unconsciously, for war the na- 
tions desired solidarity, they desired peace within. 
They wanted, to use the frank and expressive Ger- 
man word, Burgfrieden. Contention, gross inequality, 
obvious oppression within the Burg, the nation looked 
upon as a citadel, might weaken the fighting power of 

| 67 | 


ISRAEL 


the state machine. Solidarity demands inner cohesion. 
The Jews were treated reasonably well. Eighteen-sev- 
enty came and the Jews flew to the standards of their 
countries. They were more numerous and more influ- 
ential in Germany than in France. Nor should the 
historic and inner kinship of the Jew with much that is 
best in German civilization be lightly dismissed. But 
the Jews of France burned to defeat the Prussian even 
as the Jews of Germany did to humble the empire of 
the second Napoleon. The Jews fought for their coun- 
tries; they fought in gratitude for the liberation of the 
preceding years. ‘They never dreamed of its cause. 
They did not question its continuance. 

It is in the years following the Franco-Prussian war 
that one begins to gain a complete insight into the 
causes of the rise and fall of the eternal wave of Jew- 
baiting. Germany was the victor, France the defeated. 
For some years after Sedan Germany was absorbed 
in the enjoyment of her power and prestige, France 
in the healing of her wounds. ‘Then the reaction set 
in. It had been convenient and grateful to liberate 
the Jews for the purpose of solidarity and power. But 
the liberated Jews continued the activities permitted 
them and grew more numerous, more cultivated, more 
influential under the German Empire. Then arose the 
cry that the Jew was, despite assimilation and patri- 
otism, a stranger and a menace. . . . And simultane- 
ously arose in defeated France the cry that the Jew 
had undermined the forces of the country. He be- 
came a scapegoat, became the vicarious sacrifice, became 
in the person of Alfred Dreyfus literally the Crucified 

[ 68 ] 


CREATIVE EXILES 


for the sins and follies and weaknesses of a Gentile 
nationey.:'s\'. 

Dreyfus was acquitted at last; the anti-Semitic 
movement in Germany dwindled. From 1900 until 
1918 there set in, despite the horrors of the war, a 
golden age for the Jews of Germany. Jewish states- 
men were high in the councils of the nation, Jewish 
professors taught in unprecedented numbers in Ger- 
man universities, Jewish playwrights, novelists and 
poets were acclaimed. It was not much otherwise in 
France; it was quite so, except for numbers, in Eng- 
land. The nations were preparing for war and wag- 
ing war. Once more they wanted solidarity; once more 
they exercised toleration; once more they made the old 
promises and fulfilled them, too. But they fulfilled 
them not because reason and humanity and ultimate 
security demand their fulfillment. They wanted Burg- 
frieden; they wanted the codperation of the wisest, 
strongest, best, regardless of race or past. And the 
device, not a conscious one of course, succeeded. The 
Jewry of the world threw itself into the war with un- 
precedented ardor and soaked the fields of Flanders 
and France and Poland with its blood.... 

Once more there are victors, once more the van- 
quished. And in the countries of the vanquished they 
are saying and crying exactly what the vanquished 
French said and cried in 1880: the Jews have poisoned 
our civilization and have robbed us of power and of 
the possibility of effective resistance. Hence our down- 
fall. Down with the Jews! And among the Allies, 
whose victory was costly and incomplete, there arises a 


double psychology: the psychology of the victors who 
[ 69 ] 


ISRAEL 


no longer need solidarity and desire to drive the Jews 
forth from the opportunities and positions granted 
them for the sake of solidarity; and the psychology of 
insecurity, of incompleteness in victory, of the suspicion 
that an incurable wound has been inflicted on the body 
of civilization. . . . Who made the victory incomplete? 
The Jews. Who wounded our whole civilization be- 
yond measure and healing? The Jews. Pan-Germans 
and Awakening Hungarians are at one with the cohorts 
of lAction Francaise, with Ku-Klux-Klanners in 
Kansas, with leaders of business and society in New 
York and Chicago. The Jews ...the Jews... 
financiers, Reds, millionaires, Bolsheviks, patriots, 
profiteers—whatever they are, say, do. ... It is the 
Jews. Hitler, Daudet, Belloc, Ford send out the word 
among victors and vanquished: not our sins, follies, 
superstitions have wrought destruction. It is not we 
who are guilty. It is the Jews.... 

Old religious horrors blend with this feeling, primor- 
dial fears that antedate Judaism and Christianity. 
Moloch is angry, Moloch must be appeased. Throw 
him the Jews. Neither victors nor vanquished can ac- 
count for the state and nature of things. ‘They will 
not give up their worship of force nor their exercise 
of it. They will not stop making war. They invent — 
poison gases deadlier than any yet heard of. They want 
a reason and a sacrifice, a scapegoat and a propitiatory 
object. The Jews despise force and are, out of pro- 
portion to their numbers, acute competitors. The Jews 
are uncomfortable. Something about them troubles the 


conscience of the world. Something about them has 
[70 ] 


CREATIVE EXILES 


long troubled the conscience of the world. Crucify 
them! 

The cause of modern anti-Semitism is assimilation. 
The occasion of modern anti-Semitism is war. 

The abating of anti-Jewish feeling and action among 
nations preparing for war is no less ominous and 
deadly than the outbreak of such feeling and action 
that follows every modern war among both the victors 
and the defeated. The process is one. It is inherent 
in the character of a war-like civilization, in the char- 
acter of the absolutely sovereign state, the absoluteness 
of whose sovereignty would be a burden and a nuisance 
except for the expectation and the memory of war. The 
Jew will be, whatever he does, helot first, then enemy, 
then victim, until the lust for war has left the blood of 
the Gentile, until the memory of war is as hideous, as 
unnatural to the soul of the nations as it is hideous and 
unnatural to the soul of Israel... . 

The process, as I have said, is one. Optimists and 
facile assimilationists in all countries are saying that 
conditions willimprove. They are quite right. A grad- 
ual readjustment, both economic and psychical may 
take place. ‘The wounds in the world’s body and con- 
science may slowly heal. The Jew will be more blandly 
tolerated again. It will be forgotten that all the sins 
of mankind were thrown upon his shoulders. But that 
easement and abatement will mean nothing so long as 
war is at the core of civilization and competitive arm- 
ing and regimentation for war are inherent in its life.... 

“In the year 1869,” writes the redoubtable Adolf 
Bartels, “shortly before the collapse of the French Km- 
pire, a certain Des Mousseaux published a book in 


[71] 


ISRAEL 


Paris called ‘Le Juif, le Judaisme et la Judaisation des 
peuples Chrétiens.’ A similar book could have been 
written about Germany before the war. It was not - 
long before our débacle came upon us too.” 

The Jew causes defeat. The Jew troubles the victor. 
Yet in every new war the Jews go forth to battle in 
the hope of an anticipatory refutation of these argu- 
ments and their attendant horrors. The Jews go forth 
to fight. That is their sin against themselves and 
against mankind. ... But I must not anticipate. I 
may, however, repeat: the cause of modern anti-Semi- 
tism is assimilation; its occasion is war. 


IV 


In the countries of the defeated there is disillusion, 
there is the old disease of the Jews—love turned to bit- 
terness. They were mostly liberals; they are pacifists 
at heart. But they loved the people, landscape, speech 
of Germany. Like their fellow countrymen they be- 
lieved, not without reason, that the war was not one 
of offense. They threw themselves into the defense 
of the fatherland. ‘Twelve thousand of them fell in 
battle. Today they are cold and a little wary. Why 
should they not be? It was a Jew, by a world irony, 
who wrote the song of hate against England. It was | 
a Jew who gathered the poetry of the war. It was 
a Jew who tried vainly to warn the Emperor of the 
doom to come. It was a Jew—since murdered—who 
tried not unsuccessfully to gain for Germany a sym- 
pathetic hearing in the councils of the hostile nations. 
It was a Jew who made the surgical war service of 

[ 72 ] 


CREATIVE EXILES 


the Germans the best in the world. It was a Jew who, 
after the armistice, was the first German to lecture in 
German in England and America and help to reéstab- 
lish the honor of the German name. Lissauer, Bab, 
Ballin, Rathenau, Israel, Einstein. It was of no avail. 
None. The dead were of no avail nor the living. It 
is of no significance to reply that there is a liberal, 
tolerant, an eternal Germany. There is. But it is 
guilty since it is not effective. There is a liberal 
America; there is a liberal England. These are not 
effective either. ... Along the Kurfiirstendamm in 
Berlin, in the villas set in gardens in the Grunewald 
the Jews are cynical today. They speak of the Ger- 
mans objectively. They know what to expect. Better 
days will soften them again. Such days will not, I 
trust, make them forget... . 

A. Justizrat in Berlin, a charming, high-minded, cul- 
tivated gentleman. He said to me with a touch of 
melancholy pride: “Our friends blame my wife and 
me for having Jewish friends, for not joining the ranks 
of the anti-Semites. But we are devoted to our Jew- 
ish friends and they to us. We cannot forget what 
the German Jews have done and suffered for the coun- 
try.” His face darkened a little. “Of course I do not 
include in my sympathies the Jews who streamed in 
here from Poland during the war and profiteered and 
had food when we starved. ‘They are the cause of the 
evil situation today.” 

Was there any use in reminding this gentleman of 
the appeal of Ludendorff to these very Jews in Poland? 
Would it have been useful to tell him that these people 
were fugitives from slaughter and famine who fled east- 

[ 73 ] 


ISRAEL 


ward into Germany? Did he expect them to starve 
out of politeness? Surely they used their wits as best 
they could. ‘They had neither land, nor honor, nor 
possessions. They were hungry and had wives and 
children and those five wits. Was it for me to tell 
my friend the Justizrat that the Prussian landowners 
feasted through war and famine while the city-folk 
died? ‘The Junkers made the war inevitable. It was 
their country and their war. They had its glory and 
its honors, its glitter and intoxication. My Justizrat 
had no word of blame for them. He wanted the profi- 
teering Jews from the East expelled. Then he was 
willing to tolerate the assimilated German Jews who, 
he admitted gladly, were largely impoverished like his 
own class and had sacrificed all, including the blood of 
their sons, for the fatherland. And this sacrifice of 
theirs he took for granted even as he took for granted 
the sacrifices of himself and his fellow-Germans. He 
forgot that Jewish disabilities had not been wholly re- 
moved, even on paper, till 1869, that they had never 
been wholly removed in fact and that, within his own 
moral universe, the sacrifices of the Jews had an ethical 
value so much higher than his own as to outweigh a 
thousand times the enrichment of a few men from 
Warsaw. He illustrated admirably the spiritual im- 
pudence of even the best Gentiles when it comes to the ~ 
Jewish question. And he reminded me of home, of 
the well-bred American distinction between good Jews 
and bad, refined and unrefined, assimilated and the re- 
verse, Western and Eastern, cultured and ignorant.... 

The days of propitiatory assimilation are coming to 
an end. Our loftiest minds see the vision of that end. 

[ 74 ] 


CREATIVE EXILES 


It is not easy for them to consent to that vision, For 
the material in which they work is the speech and life 
of the Gentiles. They have given their gifts, they can- 
not take these gifts back. ‘They cannot relive their 
lives and give these gifts in another spirit—give them 
proudly as the gifts of Jews to mankind, instead of 
pretending to give them as Germans to Germany, 
Frenchmen to France, Englishmen to England. Thus 
they pretended to give them. And the pretense 
was discovered first by the Gentiles, then—by them- 
selves. . . . Perhaps these creative spirits always har- 
bored a profound suspicion that in the calculation of 
the assimilatory theory there was some gross if deeply 
hidden error. Early or late they were driven to speak 
of the Jew and of Jewish history and life. Even 
Schnitzler, the perfect Viennese German, wrote “Der 
Weg ins Freie” and “Professor Bernhardi.” ... 

In autumn, in the Styrian Alps, I walked and talked 
with Jakob Wassermann. ‘The tall, dark firs were mo- 
tionless in the still, cool air. It was so quiet that in 
the narrow valley you could hear the delicate thud of 
the ripe chestnuts falling on the ground. From the 
great cones of the mountains came a tranquillity reach- 
ing beyond time. The lake was steel-blue, the sunset 
one glow of temperate fire; the ice-fields of the lofty 
Dachstein glacier were white with a blinding whiteness. 
Primordial purity . . . far from the heat and hate of 
life. 

Bare-headed, in rough jacket, knickers and tall boots, 
Wassermann walked along the lake with a restrained 
and measured energy. He rarely smiled. His dark 
head had a glow of concentrated visionary passion. 

[ 75 ] 


ISRAEL 


There was no trace of the self-consciousness of fame 
in his demeanor or his words. He spoke of his plans 
for future work. These plans revealed once more the 
workings of the largest imagination of our period—an 
imagination strong enough to create a vast, coherent, 
self-sustaining world. .., I did not ask him to tell 
me how far he had gone in the processes of his inner 
life beyond the point reached in that over-intense and 
irritated book, “Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude.” 
I knew, before many words had passed between us, that 
he had left behind him the eagerness to establish the 
possibility of a complete synthesis between the Ger- 
man and the Jew. “My books are the works of a Jew 
(von einem jiidischen Menschen geschrieben) ,” he vol- 
unteered. “And did I not begin with “Die Juden von 
Zirndorf’? Our creative energy, especially in the 
Diaspora, is often denied. I cannot consent to that 
denial. I must rot.” He smiled one of his rare, child- 
like smiles, a smile that pleads for confidence and af- 
fection. “If we are not a creative people, I might as 
well string myself up to the nearest tree.’ We walked 
along in silence for a little. Then he began: “We 
have, have we not... .?”’ He went over great names, 
the names of men and creative visions from Isaiah 
to Einstein. He weighed, argued, distinguished. With 
what measure shall we mete? If with the highest, cre- 
ative spirits are few among any people. And we are 
a little people. A people scattered, homeless, open 
to every disruptive and confusing influence. Yet what 
have we not accomplished, what have we not given out 


of our fewness and our sorrows? He was, perhaps 
[ 76 ] 


CREATIVE EXILES 


beyond his consciousness of it, a Jew within Jewry, a 
lover and proclaimer of Israel. “When I consider,” 
he went on, “the hatred and stupidity vented upon 
us in every age, wreaked upon us again in this age 
and land, I am the more convinced of our import, of 
our mission. Yes, we are a very famous people.” His 
irony was hearty, purged of all bitterness. “A very 
famous people. The whole world talks about us, thinks 
about us. Why?” The landscape darkened. Behind 
us the wall of the mountain, reflecting the last rays of 
the sun, was one expanse of unimaginably rosy fire. 
We stood silent. Then we turned and Wassermann 
glanced at the bright windows of his house that stands 
by the lake and faces the great hills. “I do not know 
why. I know that we are needed. There is, for in- 
stance, a great artist who is austerely dedicated to his 
art. So austerely, in fact, that he is not much con- 
cerned with the well-being of his children, the security 
of any committed to his care. He turns out his flaw- 
less works. ‘That is all. Could I do that, in spite of 
my absorbed and tireless labors? Could any of us do 
that? We are slaves—the slaves of righteousness, of 
the ultimate humanities, of the moral energy whose 
name is love... .” 

Wassermann is one of the three or four most emi- 
nent living masters of the German language. Kiven 
the anti-Semitic professors are forced to take him seri- 
ously and to desist from their favorite phrases. They 
cannot call his work “Jewish pinchbeck.” He knows 
neither Yiddish nor Hebrew. Yet I have pictured a 


Jew, conscious of the history and character of his 
[77 ] 


ISRAEL 


people, feeling that history and character in his blood 
and heart. He has penetrated into the life of the Gen- 
tiles with an imaginative love and ardor that lead to the 
artistic identification of the self with the objects of its 
vision. But that self is a Jewish self, as all such selves 
must be from the nature of things. And today Jakob 
Wassermann sees that Jewish self of his proudly, se- 
renely. . . . Assimilation is bankrupt... . 

The scientist’s situation is simpler than the poet’s. 
Both his ideas and his symbols are universal. The 
Jewish writer clings to the speech he uses. And speech 
is drenched with historic experience, with faith, love, 
blood. Language often deceives him, makes him an 
unconscious betrayer of his ultimate self. The bio- 
chemist, the astronomer, the physicist has an aloofness 
from the heat of life that is inherent in his work. A 
chemical formula is not nationalistic; an equation in 
the realm of astro-physics lies beyond human wars. 
Hence the scientist is less imprisoned in the concrete 
and comes upon the confusions of the mortal scene 
with simplicity and freshness of sight. This becomes 
very clear upon seeing and hearing Albert Einstein. 
He has something of the saint about him and some- 
thing of the child. He lives in the universe. In the 
world of men he is awkward. His clothes do not fit. 
He takes a child-like delight in simple things. He 
is gently surprised at the follies and confusions of 
earth. He laughs at them with an infinitely kind and 
gentle laugh. He has pierced the ultimate illusions. 
He deals with the lesser ones with a soft but secure 
directness. He is not passionate. His quiet pale face 

[ 78 ] 


CREATIVE EXILES 


set in a frame of unmanageable hair hardly quickens. 
But he is earnest and certain. Confusion and psychi- 
cal unveracity bother him. One must correct unworthy 
errors. “In my home in Switzerland,” he said, “I 
hardly ever thought of the Jewish question. My work 
absorbed me. But when I came to Germany I could 
not help observing the unhappiness of the assimilatory 
Jews. They were always protesting that they were 
something that, of course, they were not. And I could 
not really blame them, but it is clear that people can- 
not live with any degree of spiritual dignity in a po- 
sition so wrong and so contradictory. I did not of 
myself discover the solution. I did not myself see 
how this negative attitude could be turned into a posi- 
tive and fruitful one. But one fine day a wise friend 
came up to my rooms and told me. And the matter 
became clear to me. The same thing has happened to 
others and the old assimilatory nonsense is pretty well 
played out.” He stopped and smiled. “When I was 
a student, for instance, it was the normal ambition of 
every Jewish student to be elected to membership into 
a fraternity where he would be insulted as little as 
possible. Today no Jewish student thinks of such a 
thing. He joins a Jewish fraternity as a matter of 
course. That is a step in the right direction. For 
the point is that our Jewish students today do this 
thing not because they are excluded elsewhere. They 
do it as a positive thing—in a spirit of national self- 
consciousness and moral self-respect.” 

Assimilation is bankrupt. Germany was the great 


laboratory of the experiment. I think that the experi- 
[ 79 ] 


ISRAEL 


ment was necessary. It was an unescapable part of 
the modern historic process. But the experiment has 
failed. It is not necessary that several American gen- 
erations be sacrificed to foreknown humiliation and 
predictable disaster, 


[ 80 ] 


CHAPTER III 
HOUSE OF BONDAGE 


I 


Tuer Polish frontier has been moved west. A few 
hours from Berlin a Polish crew boards the train. The 
world grows dark. If this darkness is a delusion of 
the eye, it is not of the mind and the memory. The 
moral atmosphere of a landscape is a thing as real as 
rock. Wrong, violence and superstition soak into hill 
and plain; where cruelty has had its age-long home 
the gold of the sun is tarnished, the harvest field has 
no richness and the stubble of autumn is submerged 
in gloom. ‘The uplands of Vermont are pure as a 
heron’s wing in flight. Over the abandoned rice-plan- 
tations of Carolina hovers the melancholy of slaves long 
dead. The plain of Poland is desolate. War and 
persecution, hunger and hate, tumult and terror are 
mative)here, 9:2. 

The Polish officials have broad faces with flat noses, 
high cheek-bones, bushy mustaches. They address 
one in their native tongue—as the Czecho-Slovak, 
Jugo-Slavic and Hungarian officials likewise do—to 
exhibit their nationalistic truculence. They know per- 
fectly that there is no chance of one’s knowing a word 
of Polish. One answers them in French, whereupon 
they begin to speak bad but fluent German and com- 
munication is established. This recurrent ceremony is 


[ 81 ] 


ISRAEL 


a symptom of the diseased condition of Balkanized 
Middle Europe.... 

Gone are the neat, well-cultivated fields, the houses 
with brightly-polished window-panes that stretch from 
the Hook of Holland through Germany to the Oder 
River. The country is large, flat, rough, primitive yet 
decayed. Peasants trudge bare-foot along the mired 
roads. ‘The villages are small and huddled; the churches 
and monasteries massive and forbidding. Force broods 
over the land—the force of the State that is alienated 
from man and his life, that is not expression but im- 
position from without, that alternately whips into sub- 
mission or inflames into violence the people of the 
country. 

Morning brings one to Warsaw, a city elegant but 
ruined. Italianate houses with lovely court-yards and 
balconies date from the beginning of the seventeenth 
century. The spirit of the West and South came again 
and again to curb the turbulent barbarism of the peo- 
ple. In vain. Thence comes the pervasive atmosphere 
of a city always ruined before it was completed, neg- 
lected, ravaged, out at heel. There are a million people 
in Warsaw today. The principal street is that of a 
small, remote, provincial Slavic town. Three hotels 
ape the West in all respects but that of cleanliness. 
There is a single coffee-house largely frequented by 
army-oflicers who rattle their sabers, drink liqueurs, 
reek of perfume and hope they have a Parisian air. 
They are well-built and neat. Their eyes are unimag- 
inative; the ruddy skin is drawn tight over their 
knuckles and cheek-bones. They are everywhere in this 
new Poland that stretches from Danzig to the Ru- 

[ 82 ] 


HOUSE OF BONDAGE 


manian frontier. They are drunk with power; the edges 
of their swords are kept sharp. They are the masters 
of minorities numbering eleven millions. They are de- 
termined to remain masters. ... 

In the center of the city stands the symbol of the 
old masters of the land. There, in a dominant position, 
the Russians built a cathedral with a tall, golden dome. 
Warsaw, which is wholly Roman Catholic and Jewish, 
was to be made aware at every moment of the insolence 
of power. The new masters, the Poles, hated the old 
tyranny not because it was tyranny, but because it was 
not their own. The Russian Cathedral is to them 
neither warning nor symbol. They are tearing it down. 
The golden dome is ripped through the middle; the 
naked rafters show; the exquisite mural paintings have 
been scratched with blunt and vicious tools; the paint 
hangs in loose shreds and patches. Tyrants build up: 
tyrants destroy. Their spirit remains one... . 

It is pleasanter away from the two main thorough- 
fares of the city. Here, too, the houses are pretentious 
and ruined—the great gray houses with their arches and 
cavernous entry halls and dark flights of stone stairs. 
But on the cobbled streets there is less sense of im- 
mediate strain, ominous force, brutal imposition. Here, 
too, the atmosphere is immeasurably cheerless. But 
here the eating-houses are kosher and there is no danger, 
as in the coffee-houses across from the Bristol Hotel, 
that a Polish officer will bring his sword crashing down 
on a table and cry: “Jews out!” There is less danger 
that, if you loiter a bit, an officer will run his blade 
through your body and be buried in flowers by the 
ladies of Warsaw for his heroic action. 


[ 88 ] 


ISRAEL 


Here walk, in caftans and caps, wearing beards and 
earlocks, the Jews of Poland. They are a little bowed. 
The centuries have been long and heavy. Stealthy 
oppression has alternated with open massacre. The 
Russian was cruel and faithless; the Pole is no less so. 
Whatever there is of hard contempt or open insult, of 
unbearable poverty, of irresistible injustice—these peo- 
ple have borne it. For many years their men-children 
and youths were stolen from them for twenty-five years 
of military servitude, for enforced baptisms, for death 
in noisome barracks or Siberian villages or on strange 
fields of battle. 'Their communal organizations were 
destroyed. ‘They were accused of ritual murder and 
of ruining the peasantry; they were confined to the 
least honorable of employments and then blamed for 
their supposed unproductivity. The Russian is gone, 
but the Pole continues his work. The Jews are a little 
bowed. | 

There has fallen upon them, most strange of all, the 
contempt of the Jewry of the West. They have been 
again and again the objects of charity. But the as- 
similationists of Germany, England, America who have 
commiserated their fate, have hoped for them, at best, 
crumbs from the table of a more tolerant polity. I 
shall not be accused of defending superstition as such. 
Neither Rabbinical rigidness nor Chassidic Mysticism, 
despite the genuine saintliness of isolated Zaddikim, 
has any saving power. I am glad to see the citadel of 
orthodoxy a ruin today. But that it was defended and 
kept standing by so many indomitable generations in 
Poland was due to an instinct as correct as it was pro- 
found. For it saved millions from those disintegrat- 

[ 84 ] 


HOUSE OF BONDAGE 


ing influences that have produced the persecuted as- 
similationist—that strangest and most pitiful of 
creatures, who is not a Jew and cannot be a non-Jew 
and wanders, an unhappy phantom, between two alien 
worlds. The “Poles of Mosaic faith’—they existed of 
course—never made any headway here. The masses 
stood firm. ‘The Chassidim, in fact, feared and dis- 
trusted the sporadic offers of civic and political rights. 
For they perceived quite clearly that here, as elsewhere, 
these rights were offered them not as an inalienable hu- 
man possession of which they had been robbed, but as a 
favor in return for which they were to be “improved” 
into the likeness of what they were not and could never 
be. The Polish Jews, in brief, insisted upon the exercise 
of their most fundamental right—the right to be them- 
selves. They were willing to sell the right at no price. 
Unguided by any philosophical insight they did in 
practice resist the concept of the master state which 
offers its slaves privileges in return for psychical regi- 
mentation in peace and physical regimentation in war. 
They remained a people. They fought conscription 
by passive resistance. They fought Russification and 
Polonization in the same manner. They held out 
through the terrible pogrom waves from Odessa in 1871 
to Bialystok in 1906. During this very period, in fact, 
they created their own enlightenment, the Haskala, 
from within, practically the whole of Yiddish litera- 
ture, and laid the foundations of the modern literature 
of the Hebrew tongue. Hence at the end of the World 
War they were in a position to demand minority rights 
and minority representation and theoretically at least 


[ 85 ] 


ISRAEL 


to aim 2 blow at the evils of the master state. They 
are bowed; they are unbroken. 

In Warsaw an old and a new world are to be seen. 
But both are Jewish worlds. Both have a meaning not 
only for Jewry, but for mankind. . . . Through dark 
hallways, up broken stairs I went to see a rabbi. He 
sat at the head of a long table in a brownish room 
filled with the faint musty odor of the. Hebrew tomes 
that lined the walls. A beautiful old man in black 
silk cap and caftan with severe eyes but tender hands 
and a long white beard. Here he sits all day at prayer 
and study. But his door is open and the people come 
to him for counsel and comfort. He told me that his 
grandfather had been a famous rabbi in Berlin in the 
days following the Mendelssohnian enlightenment and, 
seeing the road of assimilation that the younger genera- 
tion was sure to tread, had sent his children to War- 
saw. He had been willing to risk for them the horrors 
of Russian misrule rather than the comforts and profits 
of Germanization. My old friend, who has the rep- 
utation of not being illiberal, took it for granted that 
I would understand. And I did. For I have come 
to see that the relation of Jews to their faith and legends 
and traditional wisdom is not like the relation of the 
peoples of the West to their religion. Primitive 
Christianity is Jewish and has never converted the — 
Gentiles. The pomp of Rome and her gods is in 
the South; Germanic festivals and legends and epics 
rule the north. Hence the Christian world whose re- 
ligion is divided from its national culture has lost the 
conception of an autonomous, national faith. We Jews 
need not believe in our religion even as enlightened 

[86] 


HOUSE OF BONDAGE 


Greeks did not believe in gods or oracles. It is the 
still veracious symbol of our national character and 
history. The Torah and the Prophets, the wisdom 
books and legends of later ages—these are our Iliads 
and Nibelungen Lays; they express our national char- 
acter, our essentially eternal traits. ‘The chivalric war- 
like Gentile does not find himself in the Gospel. He 
has to be converted again and again. When it suits 
him he abrogates the teachings of his faith, and 
preaches hate in the name of Jesus. The Jew need 
believe nothing. But when he reads of Joseph ask- 
ing concerning the old man, his father, and weeping; 
when he reads that the ground must lie fallow every 
seventh year for the poor and must not be held in 
perpetuity since it is God’s; when he reads of the 
Jubilee year in which all wrongs are to be righted and 
every man returned unto his own; when he reads of 
Gideon’s refusal of power; when he reads that a young 
poet and musician was chosen to be king; when he 
reads in Isaiah of a golden age not in the past but 
in the future, a golden age whose name for all peoples 
shall be peace—when he reads these things he comes 
home to his people and himself. For these ideas and 
events express his innermost self; they are today, as 
they have been in the past, the exact image of his in: 
nate character and modes of thought... . 

The old and the new in Warsaw. . . . A wind-swept 
railroad junction at the edge of desolate fields. Shabby 
passenger cars waiting for a locomotive. In a com- 
partment of one of them the windows are open and 
you see two old men. The younger has a crafty look; 
the older one of infinite mildness. They are two fa- 

[ 87 ] 


ISRAEL 


mous Zaddikim, the Radzimener and the Kornarner. 
Many stories are told of the Kornarner Zaddik, of his 
extraordinary insight into the human heart, the strength 
and exactness of his intuitive perceptions, the saintli- 
ness of his walk and conversation. Below the window 
of the compartment a crowd of men and women is 
gathered. A few of the men wear caftans. But most 
of the men and women might be poor working people 
anywhere. They yearn toward that window. ‘The 
nearest climb toward it to touch the Zaddik’s gar- 
ment. Finally he leans out of the window and dis- 
tributes small coins among the people. The coins have 
been in his hands and will bring good fortune and the 
fulfillment of desire... . 

From such scenes it is, physically, but a little way 
to the great Yiddish and Hebrew publishing houses 
whose editions of Goethe and Spinoza and Bergson, of 
Flaubert and Rolland and Wassermann are constantly 
exhausted. It is but a little way to banquets given 
in honor of the living Yiddish or Hebrew poets and 
novelists and playwrights. And the point to be made 
is the continuity of these two worlds in Poland. The 
new is not an alien world; it grew out of the old; it is 
not the fruit of assimilation; it is the flowering of the 
nation itself. Not that these people practise deliberate 
isolation. ‘They command the idioms of their part of 
Europe; they are cultivated in Polish literature; Vilna 
gave birth not only to the creators of modern Hebrew 
poetry, the Lebensohns, father and son, but also to 
Frug who, though in every sense a Jewish poet, is said 
to command one of the noblest lyrical styles in modern 
Russian literature. 

[ 88 ] 


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The continuity of Jewish culture in Poland can best 
be studied in an unfamiliar and neglected field. In 
the house of the Kehillah of Warsaw there is a small 
museum in which are preserved examples of Jewish 
craftsmanship dating from the sixteenth century on. 
There are spice-shakers, Chanukah candle-sticks, wine 
pitchers and flasks, platters for the dedication and re- 
lease of the first-born, shields, bells and crowns for 
the adornment of the Torah scrolls, bookbindings, il- 
luminated manuscripts and wedding-certificates, rings 
and elaborate embroideries. It must be remembered 
that no Gentile craftsman took a Jewish apprentice 
and that this beautiful and curious art, quaint and 
imaginative at once, grew up within the community 
which is saved. 

In another room of the same building there is an 
exhibition of contemporary craftsmanship and contem- 
porary painting. These young designers and colorists 
who exhibit here have had, of course, all the influences 
of the modern world at their command. Yet they feel 
their work to be part of an unbroken tradition, part 
of the same tradition in which their lives, too, are rooted. 
For they are pitifully poor. They are hungry. There 
is no one in Poland to employ them; the great world 
knows nothing of them. Yet as their fathers knew 
need and cold and were not to be turned aside from 
the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, as they 
saw it, by the temptations of the world, so these Jewish 
youths cling to their chosen art. Apostasy of any sort 
is rare among us. It is especially rare in Poland. 
These Jews have never dreamed of being anything but 
Jews. As such they endured through the ages, as such 

[ 89 ] 


ISRAEL 


they are now fighting their hopeless battle for the rights 
guaranteed them by the constitution of the new republic 
of Poland. 


II 


The modern history of the Jews in Poland, in the 
entire pale of settlement of the old Russian empire, il- 
lustrates with barbaric insolence the theory of the 
master state. The continuous projects of the Russian 
government were directed toward the end of making 
the Jews “useful” citizens by “improving” them. The 
methods employed to gain this end were various: the 
censorship of Hebrew books, the offer of various ease- 
ments, reliefs, rewards for Russification, Polonization, 
baptism, the extension of military servitude, the expul- 
sion of the Jews from the villages and the open coun- 
try, their division into rigid classes, some more favored 
some less, the practical legalizing of pogroms. In the 
last years of the Russian empire the government, havy- 
ing come to the conclusion that the Jews could not be 
“improved” into “usefulness,” declared frankly that 
“the Western frontier was open.” The result was first 
the great migration to America, next the birth of that 
movement that has since become known as Zionist. 

The methods of the Russian government in the past 
stirred the world to anger and pity. The methods of 
the Polish government today are precisely the same. 
The theory behind those methods was, however, sin- 
cerely held and does not differ very vitally from the 
theory of the state and the citizen held instinctively 
by many an enlightened American or Englishman who 
would be the first to protest against open oppression 

[ 90 ] 


HOUSE OF BONDAGE 


and to be horrified at massacre. For, according to 
that theory, the state is an abstract, absolute sovereign. 
It makes little difference in practice whether that ab- 
solute sovereignty is concretely identified with a mon- 
arch, an oligarchy or a real or fictive majority. The 
master State, in this conception, has the right to set 
norms of “usefulness” for its citizens and to compel 
them to conform to this norm. It has the right, then, 
in regard to any group of citizens, of isolation, as- 
similation, exclusion by force. It can conscript work, 
goods and life. It acknowledges no obligation except 
that of “protection.” This means, in practice, that 
it protects life and property against all but itself. So 
soon as it considers its interests, which are never iden- 
tical with the interests of the people, imperiled, it will 
hold life literally cheaper than dirt. It will be a little 
more careful of money than of life. But it is quite 
as capable of expropriation as it is of conscription. 
Its manners differ among different nations. Its funda- 
mental morals know no change. The Fascist dictator- 
ship in Italy silences the opposition press by brute 
force; Mr. Henry Ford foresees crises in which the na- 
tion (he means the State) will want to get “some- 
thing done” and in which constitutional guarantees and 
such trifles “will not matter.” 

I shall not enter into a discussion of the causes that 
make otherwise humane and intelligent men cling to 
the theory of the master State. The ways of that 
State are mischievous and degrading. Its only posi- 
tive quality is efficiency in war. Upon this efficiency 
in war its defense will always be finally grounded. And 
it will be so grounded not on account of the belliger- 


[91] 


ISRAEL 


ency, but on account of certain rooted fears in human 
nature. From the memories of innumerable ages man 
is still fearful of the ambush, attack, slaughter, en- 
slavement of primitive warfare. These things have 
actually ceased to be. If we examine the creation of 
a war-psychosis in modern times, however, we shall find 
that the propaganda of the State appeals to these im- 
memorial terrors and issues the call. to arms under 
threats of a hostile razing of cities, slaughter of men, 
theft of women and cattle. 

Nor is this all. The State never permits the war- 
psychosis to die out. It lkens the great communities 
of today to an African kraal or, at best, to a walled 
hamlet of the Middle Ages. In that kraal, in that 
hamlet the secret presence of the member of another 
and equally warlike tribe might have constituted a real 
danger. A moment’s reflection will show that the Ger- 
manization of Poles, the Czechization of Germans, the 
Italianization of the Southern Tyrolese, the slaughter 
of Armenians, the enforced regimentation of national 
minorities everywhere is put into practice and defended 
on the ground of that absurd and untenable analogy. 
The Czechs wanted the rich industrial districts of north- 
ern Bohemia. That is brutal but comprehensible. It 
is mad, primordial and irrational that ancient German 
cities are officially called by Slavic names, that the 
Czechs attempt to break down the educational system 
of over three millions of Germans, precisely as the Rus- 
sians sought to destroy the Cheder and Yeshivah, that | 
the minority rights guaranteed the Germans are sys- 
tematically evaded or abrogated. 

Not only in old Russia and in new Poland, but every- 

[ 92 ] 


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where and always, from the days of the Pharaoh of the 
Exodus to those of the last exalted Kleagle of the Klan, 
the active motives of Jew-baiting are derived from the 
conception of the absolutely sovereign State that is 
either preparing for war or at war. Why did the Rus- 
sians seek to “improve” the Jews into “usefulness” to 
the State, that is, into likeness to themselves? It was 
not mere dislike. A rational man may dislike another 
intensely without ever dreaming of making that other 
over in his own image. Variety of character, culture, 
experiences, are, indeed, academically admitted to be an 
enrichment of human society. But academically only. 
The practical measures of all contemporary states, from 
our own immigration laws and Americanization efforts, 
to the bestialities of the dominant Poles and awakening 
Magyars are unthinkable—quite literally unthinkable— 
without the conception of the state as an armed camp 
of drilled cannon-fodder. 

In great and, complex societies the actual motives for 
the persecution of minorities are not always on the sur- 
face. In smaller and more primitive groups they are 
clear at once. In Hungary today even the “awakening 
Magyars” are not considered sufficiently hot and active. 
A super-Fascist organization has been formed with the 
avowed purpose of clearing at least sixty-three counties 
of Jews, expelling all Jews who settled in the country 
later than 1900, withdrawing from all other Jews both 
political and civic rights, bringing all wealthy Jewish 
landholders and industrialists to trial for “hostility to 
the Magyars.”* Asa matter of fact the assimilation of 
the Jewish bourgeoisie in Hungary was as complete as 


1 Neue Freie Presse. No. 21663 (Jan. 4, 1925). 
[ 98 | ‘ 


ISRAEL 


possible and the creation of modern Magyar literature 
and scholarship owes an inestimable debt to Jewry. The 
Hungarian plays that hold the stages of Europe and 
America are nearly all the works of Jews. But 
Hungary was confined to very narrow boundaries after 
the war; the Magyars have no thought but reconquest 
and revenge. They were badly frightened by the Jewish 
leadership of the brief Communist experiment in Buda- 
pest. They want neither revolutionaries, nor writers, 
nor scholars. They want neither idealists, well or 
ill guided, nor merchants, nor manufacturers, nor any 
one who by character or occupation is concerned with 
peace and the tasks of peace. The Jews are for peace 
or, at the extremest, for such reforms as in their judg- 
ment, whether right or wrong, lead to justice and to 
peace. Hence they are now felt to be alien and danger- 
ous to that armed camp which is the Hungarian State. 
The “active Magyars”’ fear the pacific influence of the 
Jewish press. ‘They are prepared to establish a dictator- 
ship at Kecskemét. They desire to plunge Hungary 
into the complete darkness of Balkan war and confusion. 
They are prepared to organize pogroms on a large 
Seale, les te | 

A. sinister hush has settled down over the city of 
Budapest. One can see that it was once a gay and 
brilliant capital. It is still handsome. ‘There is a 
grandeur about the Danube here that it has not nearer 
the Western Mountains. The royal palace stands on a 


high bank and the sun sets magnificently behind it. In > 


the streets below there is little trade or traffic. There 
is the breath of uncertainty, of fear, of all things harsh 


and ominous. Hate, persecution and the cold lust for 
[ 94 ] 


OE 


HOUSE OF BONDAGE 


war poison the air and landscape here as they do in 
Poland. It is a relief to cross the frontier even into 
Czecho-Slovakia. Even Pressburg (now fov»lishly 
called Bratislava) seems homelike and with delight one 
drives through the exquisite villages of Austria. . . 

In Hungary there is nothing to counteract the mas- 
ter State. In Poland there is. For in Poland the Jews, 
as I have pointed out, never became assimilated in con- 
siderable numbers, but kept their cultural autonomy al- 
most intact. Hence in the formation of the new Repub- 
lic of Poland they were recognized as a_ national 
n.inority having minority rights. Formally, at least, 
the post-war treaties established a state here that was 
to exist by virtue of the free cooperation of the nation- 
alities composing it. The affirmation in law of the 
possibility and necessity of such states is the one positive 
achievement of the otherwise infamous and disastrous 
treaties of Versailles. One wonders, however, whether 
the makers of the treaties who in their own practice em- 
braced the theory of the master State, actually expected 
the state of codperating nationalities to function accord- 
ing to the provisions of the compacts involved. The 
cold cynicism of one of the signatories was brilliantly 
symbolized to me by the apparition of a French General, 
sky-blue uniform, glittering decorations, gray Henri 
Quatre, which was the first thing the eye met in the 
doorway of the Hotel Bristol at Warsaw. . . 

The non-assimilation of the Polish Jews, however, 
and the presence of the German, Ukrainian, Russian 
and White Russian minorities in Poland made the estab- 
lishment of a state of codperating nationalities, at least 
on paper, all but inevitable. ‘The Poles had been 
; [ 95 ] 


ISRAEL 


wronged and oppressed for centuries. So much was 
certain. Their own character and history were forgot- 
ten. There was wanted, furthermore, a belligerent 
buffer-state between Germany and Russia. Hence the 
Poles asked for everything in sight and got it. Their 
Republic has a population of thirty millions. Nineteen 
millions of Poles live in this Republic and eleven millions 
of non-Poles. A gesture was necessary; a gesture, fine 
enough as such, was made. 

But the Poles had long been thirsting for power. 
They called it liberation and meant dominance. Once 
they had welcomed the Jews as fellow-sufferers under 
Russian rule, as fellow-fighters against it. In 1794 
Berek Joselewitz had raised a regiment of light cavalry 
among his fellow-Jews. The regiment fought under 
Kosciuszko and perished almost to a man in the defense 
of Warsaw. Again during the Polish uprising in 1830 
a Jewish fighting unit in Central Poland carried its 
special ensign against the Russian tyrant. Men came 
from far villages, men unused to violence and blood. 
Upon their ensign they engraved in the middle of the 
shield held by the Polish eagle’s claws the name of 
Jehovah in Hebrew. They studded the ensign with 
jewels and their women embroidered the rich silk that 
surrounds the glittering shield. Once more they fell. 
The ensign was hidden away from the anger of the 
Russian. When the Polish Republic was declared the 


ensign and the banner were brought forth.... I 


stood before it in the house of a friend in Warsaw. 'The 

jewels still glitter softly in the shield. The engraving 

of the name of Jehovah is sharp and fresh. . . . The 

ensign and the sacrifice are forgotten as such things 
[96] 


gras. 


HOUSE OF BONDAGE 


always are. The work of war and violence was futile as 
it must always be. So soon as their liberation was in 
sight the Poles determined to be masters in a master 
State, to crush minorities into uniformity, starve them 
into submission or drive them into exile. The Jews have 
shared their air and earth and bread for nine hundred 
years; their ancient wooden synagogues are the oldest 
architectural monuments on Polish ground. These 
things do not matter. The master State, preparing for 
war, has neither memory nor faith. It can guarantee 
minority rights without a scruple, with no intention of 
permitting those rights to be exercised. Its sovereignty 
is absolute. The Polish state, moreover, has a clear 
memory. It knows that the four million Jews within 
its borders cannot be “improved” into being Poles, but 
demand the right, guaranteed them by the nations, of 
being themselves. Hence that state has determined to 
boycott, to starve, to degrade the Jews, to crush them 
to utter subservience or to actual death. “How do you 
survive at all?’ I kept asking my friends in Poland. 
The answer was always the same: “We survive for a 
little because the Pole is not as crafty as he is barbar- 
ous.” And always they added with a rather wistful 
smile: “But see Vilna... .” 


lif 


Leaving behind the flat expanse of central Poland, 
the train, feeling its way over frail wooden bridges, 
enters a gently rolling country traversed by winding 
streams. Far in the fields, diminished by the distance, 
barefoot peasants exercise their primitive husbandry. 

[97 ] 


ISRAEL 


Nearer the foreground a woman in a brilliant head- 
kerchief plies a wooden flail. Low frame houses appear 
along the track. The tiny gables and eaves and porches 
are fretted with the wood-carving of the White Rus- 
sians. A. forlorn station appears and by it stands a 
train of small freight-cars filled with peasants, They 
throng the door-ways. They have broad, placid faces. 
Many are clad in the shabby semi-Western fashion of 
Warsaw. But the majority of the women still wear 
the gay skirts and bodices and head-kerchiefs of their 
ancestral costume and strings within strings of many- 
colored beads go well with the dark eyes and red cheeks 
above. They are pilgrims, Polish or White Russian or 
Lithuanian. One group is singing. Perhaps they are 
going to that wonder-working Madonna in Vilna whose 
open shrine spans the street where soldiers and peasants 
and beggars and priests kneel on the sharp cobble- 
stones and where, Jew or Gentile, you pass with un- 
covered head or are dragged to jail... . 

The city lies before one—huddled, desolate, medizval. 
The gilded cupolas of the Russian monasteries against 
the pale blue sky serve only to accentuate the chill and 
dread and strange remoteness of the place. It is a very 
still city despite its one hundred and fifty thousand in- 
habitants. ‘There is no horse-car, tramway or omnibus. 
The poor trudge. The less poor and the stranger are 
trundled over the cobble-stones in small horse-cabs. 
The drivers round sharp corners suddenly and warn the 
passers-by—a peasant woman carrying a pig across her 
shoulders, a grave old Jew, a tall priest, a harlot in her 
pitiful imitation of European finery—with a long, low, 


toneless, nhuman cry... . 
[ 98 ] 


HOUSE OF BONDAGE 


Here, as in Warsaw, as in other Polish cities, the 
flathouses are three or four stories high and are built 
of brick covered with mortar. The facades and cornices 
often have a faded, old-fashioned elegance. But the 
plaster has crumbled off in great, ragged patches and 
the houses have a sordid and dejected air. All walls 
are broken, all enclosures somewhere open to the wind, 
all pavements half-sunken in the earth. Tough grass 
sprouts from crumbling brick and mortar to be nibbled 
at by vaguely wandering goats. ‘The Roman churches 
are plain and angular. An occasional niche in their 
gray, blank walls holds a saint’s image. On their steps 
huddle old women with pitifully bandaged feet and 
stretch out dirty, shriveled, hopeless hands after an 
alms. Contemptuously a Russian monk black-hatted 
and long-haired, passes by; next a Jew, ragged, nervous, 
mobile. The barefooted hag who listlessly sweeps up 
the horse-manure with a primitive broom of twigs does 
not look up. ... 

According to the Poles there are fifty thousand Jews 
in Vilna; according to the Jews themselves there are 
over seventy thousand. Whichever number is correct, 
the nine-hundred-year-old Jewish settlement in Poland 
has left no deeper traces anywhere. Amid the incon- 
ceivable squalor of this place, from the crooked, crippled, 
crazily winding alleys of its noisome Ghetto, arose again 
and again the dignity of learning and the authority of 
spiritual power. Here an endless succession of rabbis 
composed those mighty tomes of scholastical and 
juridical lore that throng the shelves of the old 
synagogal library; here lived and studied and wrote the 


famous Gaon or genius of Vilna, a mighty scholar and 
[99 ] 


ISRAEL 


teacher and fierce foe of the Chassidic sectaries; here, 
as I have pointed out, lived the founders of the modern 
Jewish renaissance whose verse and prose, in Yiddish 
and Hebrew, is now read by thousands in far cities of 
which the ancient rabbis never dreamed... . 

The Ghetto is open now and nothing is left of the 
ancient gates but the brick arches, spanning the alleys, 
from which the gates once hung. Yet these alleys could 
never have been more wretched. The effort of the Poles 
to starve the Jews into utter degradation is grimly 
effective here. Dozens of shops, mere holes, are punched 
into the ancient rotting walls. The whole stock of one is 
a handful of smoked fish, of another a few boxes of 
wilted greens, of a third pins and needles and remnants 
of cheap cloth. ‘There are neither doors nor windows. 
Somewhere, deep in these caverns, the people live. 
Sometimes the row of shops is broken and through a 
ruined brick archway you can enter a court-yard of 
fetid, teeming life. Nowhere in the world is there more 
naked poverty. But these people do not beg. These 
people are in such rags as eyes accustomed to Western 
civilization have not seen in the slums of post-war Lon- 
- don and Berlin. On the faces of most of them are the 
marks of hunger and of fear. Yet there is a curious 
erectness about them and a dignity unobliterated even 
here. Filthy, starved, oppressed, they cling to that 
strange eternal thought that they are, in the words of 
the Torah, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. .. . 

In the middle of the Ghetto is a single court-yard that 
is tolerably airy and reasonably clean. It is the court- 
yard of the houses of study and prayer. One entire 


side is occupied by the famous old synagogue. ‘The 
[ 100 | 


HOUSE OF BONDAGE 


building, which is over three hundred years old, is 
square, plain, massive. It is sunk deep into the earth, 
since the Poles would not permit it to be built higher 
than the churches of its day; its tall windows are all 
toward the court-yard, for no window was permitted 
to face the streets beyond the Ghetto. Its dignity and 
austere beauty are within. Four huge pillars of marble 
sustain the entire structure. The walls are plain. But 
the great ark that holds the many scrolls of the law is 
adorned with carvings and with hand-wrought metal 
work that illustrate once more the unbroken tradition 
of fine and ancient Jewish craftsmanship. 

Enter the synagogue at any hour—it need be neither 
Sabbath nor festival—and you will find men in the act 
of prayer. Over their rags they have draped their 
praying-shawls; they have covered their heads with 
them. On their foreheads are the capsules that hold the 
law. Many are tall, gaunt figures. The eyes of all but 
the very aged have a smoldering light in them. They 
sit or stand; they sway back and forth; their gestures 
are their own and without prescribed formalism. They 
chant in study or to glorify the Lord of the World. 
They barely note the stranger. They are half-starved 
workingmen and shop-keepers. What, in the world, 
do they live on? The Polish Jew lives on wind! 'That 
is the classical joke. What does it matter? They can- 
not have less than they have. Meantime they raise their 
voices unto Jehovah and remember the mountain that 
burned with fire unto the heart of heaven. .. . 

Below, in chambers almost subterranean, is the great 
library of the synagogue. Volumes of Hebrew legend 
and learning date from the second half of the fourteenth 

[ 101 ] 


ISRAEL 


century. The early Hebrew printers were craftsmen 
second to none and though the wood-cuts and later the 
copper-plates are primitive in design, the mechanical 
execution is delicate and precise. Manuscripts abound, 
both plain and illuminated; the intricate Hebrew letters 
were traced by these ancient penmen with more than 
monastic exactitude and grace. Last the shabby, long- 
coated librarian, himself a scholar and-an author, shows 
you the original manuscripts, written in cursive rab- 
binical letters, of the works of the Gaon. They are 
worth a fortune; Western universities and orientalists 
would be eager to buy them. They are not for sale. 
Holiness and hunger and the pride of these are native 
HELE Ahan: 

Out in the feeble sunlight once more, you cross the 
court-yard and enter a smaller and plainer house of 
prayer. This one was built in 1748 and here the Gaon 
himself sat at prayer and study. The place is never 
empty, neither this nor any other synagogue or Beth 
Hamidrash of the dozens that flank the court or crowd 
the quarter. This world and its ways are evil—more 
evil nowhere than in this land and this city. It is the 
eternal world of Israel’s history and hope that men try 
to dwell in. All day resounds the song of prayer and 
the chant of study; hungry hucksters and mechanics are 
notable scholars and subtle disputants. If the belly is 
empty, the mind at least is not... . 

The contents of this tradition are changing. The 
tradition itself should stand firm. You feel that pro- 
foundly in one of the most moving places in the world— 


the old Jewish graveyard on the outskirts of the town. 
[ 102 } 


HOUSE OF BONDAGE 


It is eight hundred years old and the oldest graves have 
sunk deep into the earth. But of the simple sarcophagi 
many remain that are four centuries old. They were 
built in the shape of tiny gabled houses of brick. In 
the front of each was an opening through which one 
could read, the Hebrew entablature. Today most of 
them are ruined. The little side walls were broken in 
the successive pogroms and desecrations of the centuries, 
seeds were blown in and grass and clover cover the floor. 
But most of the inscriptions are intact, especially the in- 
scriptions that mark the resting places of the Gaon and 
of other learned and holy rabonim. ‘Tradition has it 
that even the fiercest fires spare the synagogues, which 
accounts for the preservation of many of the old wooden 
houses of prayer in remote towns and villages of Poland, 
where pogroms are as native as disease. Here, too, the 
symbols of the imperishable are intact... . 

Of the imperishable. . . . And of the strange wan- 
derings and pathos of the human heart. . . . You fol- 
low a narrow foot-path through the long, matted grass 
to the very end of the graveyard and find a great heap 
of rubble from which grows a single tree. This is the 
grave of a Polish count and magnate named Valenti 
Potozki who, in the middle of the eighteenth century, 
embraced the Jewish religion and fled from his friends 
and fellow-countrymen and became an outcast in a 
village of outcasts. A wicked and envious Jew named 
Jossel denounced Potozki to the Church. There was a 
trial and the count was burned and his ashes were 
brought hither by pious Jews. He had not recanted 


and hence his grave is a holy place. Men and women 
[ 103 ] 


ISRAEL 


come to the grave of the Ger Zedek, the stranger become 
a holy one, and throw a bit of stone or mortar on it in 
commemoration of their visit and in token of some wish 
or prayer. So at least the attendant caretaker tells you. 
And he tells you further that the Ger Zedek cursed his 
betrayer Jossel who became an outcast from among his 
own people and whose descendants bear the mark of 
that curse to this very hour... . 

It is very peaceful out in the pe Abe) The marks 
of riot and pogrom that did not even spare the monu- 
ments of the dead seem withdrawn into a past that 
is remote and calm. Back in the Vilna streets with 
their heavy-jowled priests and long-sabered, carefully 
gloved, hard-eyed Polish officers, comes to you the breath 
of present menace and immediate hate. Cultivated and 
moneyed Jews, of whom there are a very few, live in a 
hasty, semi-proletarian fashion. Their great-grand- 
fathers’ great-grandfathers were here and wished to 
make this land their home. But these men and women 
today do not feel secure enough to build a house. Vilna 
changed masters eight times during the recent wars. 
The Germans and the Soviet forces alone refrained 
from plundering and slaughtering the Jews. The Poles 
were the most implacable. And the Poles are per- 
manent masters now... . 

No, the Jews do not build houses. But they remain 
the people of the book. Out of their indescribable pov- 
erty they support two teachers’ seminaries, four gym- 
nasia, also kindergartens, public schools and evening 
schools. In spite of the minority rights guaranteed by 


the Western nations that established the Polish republic, 
[ 104 | 


HOUSE OF BONDAGE 


none of these schools receive any state aid, although 
sixty per cent of all urban taxes are paid by Jews. The 
graduates of the Jewish colleges are not admitted to 
Polish universities. They are admitted to the uni- 
versities of Belgium and Switzerland. But who can go 
to Belgium or to Switzerland? Who can go anywhere? 
It does not matter. It does not matter that the pay of 
all teachers is months in arrears. Nothing matters 
except that, amid hunger and pain, these institutions be 
maintained. . . . In the bare class-rooms of the Yiddish 
Teachers’ Seminary are attempts at biological labo- 
ratories and improvised studios for modeling. There 
are no facilities. There are results. For there is talent; 
there is the fervor of the spirit and the passion for learn- 
ing. The Gaon is alive not only amid the Talmudical 
disputations of the synagogical court-yard and library; 
he is alive here; he is alive in slum and school and street. 
. .. There is no food; there is no raiment; there is no 
security. Hard-headed, politically trained men tell you 
that any war engaged in by the Polish republic would 
be the signal for coldly deliberate pogroms unequaled 
in history. . . . Prayer and study go on; the schools and 
colleges persist through inconceivable hardships; dread 
and disaster are swept aside. The spirit of Israel is 
unbowed. .. . This is assuredly the better part of 
human history: victory in defeat, erectness under oppres- 
sion, patience in suffering, the mind that will not hate 
but is unconquerable. All men of all races who love 
liberty and peace have a special relation to the Jews of 
Vilna; they have a share in the Gaon’s study; they 


should throw a memorial on the Ger Zedek’s grave. 
[ 105 | 


ISRAEL 


IV 


It is of importance to the Jews, it is of importance to 
the world that the precise conditions in Poland be made 
known. It is of crucial importance to make it clear how 
little it avails to declare and establish legal compacts if 
the principles of those compacts are utterly alien to the 
consciousness of the people who are to be curbed. Those 
compacts are like the laws of war. War, being bar- 
barous in its nature, knows no law but that of force. 
The state of codperating nationalities cannot be imposed 
by legal fiat upon a people arrogant and warlike, splen- 
did and dirty, gallant and superstitious. 

But before discussing the conditions that obtain in 
the Polish state, I shall try to clarify once more an 
historic misunderstanding, an historic division among 
the Jewish people itself. 

West and East! In the consciousness of Western 
Jews and of the liberal Gentiles of the West, these two 
words have become synonymous with enlightenment and 
ignorance, progress and reaction, almost with honesty 
and its reverse. The Jews of the West have been chari- . 
table to their Kastern brethren, but have disliked them; 
they have quietly consented when Gentile friends have 
asked: “But between you and these people is there not 
a great gulf?” 

There is a great gulf. But that gulf must be bridged; 
it is being bridged today. For the division between 
West and East has been attributed to superficial causes 
and characterized by accidental marks. The division is 


between nationalism and assimilation; between being 
[ 106 ] 


HOUSE OF BONDAGE 


oneself and seeking favor by trying to be what one can 
never be. The East went to the extreme of excluding 
Gentile culture from its consciousness. But it preserved 
the nation. The West went to the extreme of letting 
Gentile culture conquer it and awoke to find itself, 
despite that conquest, irrevocably stamped as alien by 
the Gentile world. Had not the East preserved the 
nation, the West would have today neither refuge nor 
reliance, neither human dignity for the present nor heart 
for the future. The Polish Jew may be deprived of 
his rights. He may suffer. But he is the member of a 
people whom the nations have acknowledged, to whom, 
according to those nations, rights are due. The Jew of 
Germany and of America is a suppliant at many gates; 
he treads the weary stairs of others . . . the stairs wind 
up andup. Thereisnoend.... 

At this troubling point I can so well guess the inner- 
most fears of my American friends. “Are we to give 
up our very souls? For the culture of the West is in 
our very souls. Are we to stop being, feeling, doing 
what we have always been and felt and done?” The 
answer is: You are to give up nothing you possess, ex- 
cept the delusion of assimilation. AI] you have you shall 
own—but you shall own it as Jews. You shall be less 
arrogant but prouder, never servile but more capable 
of the grace of humility. You shall no longer feel ex- 
cluded. Your solidarity and cohesion shall seem right 
and natural to yourselves and to others. To others! 
Why has the assimilationist Jew so rarely Gentile 
friends? Not business associates and courteous col- 


leagues, but friends? The reason is that subtly but 
[ 107 | 


4 


ISRAEL 


constantly, by a thousand implications, the assimila- 
tionist Jew says to the Gentile: “I am like you: we are 
one and at one; overlook these little peculiarities of me 
and my house and my children. ‘They do not count.” 
And something within the Gentile, the most tolerant, 
the most finely attuned, answers and answers rightly: 
“Why so anxious? What does that anxiety conceal? 
Are we really quite alike? I doubt it; I should deprecate 
it a little.” A suitor can never be a friend. One who 
asks for friendship as a favor can never be a friend. He 
who asks a favor is humbled and he who grants it is 
shamed at seeing the other’s humiliation. .. . 

The East has stood firm amid the disasters of the ages. 
Its gift to the Western Jew is this: He shall remember 
that he belongs not to a sect, but to a people that has its 
history, traditions, character, rights. He shall no longer 
comfort himself with Jewish achievement, charity, law- 
abidingness, with all the psychical machinery of 
propitiation. Nor shall he shiver if a Jew turns out to 
be a rascal. He shall no longer try to justify his exist- 
ence. He has seen no American do so, no Frenchman, 
not even a Montenegrin or Albanian. Why should he? 
Because the Gentile world robbed him of his land, 
destroyed his Temple, drove him forth? His wrongs 
give him a higher right. But he need not insist upon 
that right. That a people has appeared upon the scene 
of human history and sustained itself there is an ultimate 
fact. It needs no defense, no explanation. We are, 
wherever, we are, of right. We are Jews of right. This 
is what the East has never forgotten. This is what the 


West must learn. ... 
[ 108 ] 


HOUSE OF BONDAGE 


East and West! During the war a friend of mine was 
running a school for wireless telegraphy in New York. 
And a great many young Russian and Polish Jews 
came there to study. My friend watched this process 
with growing irritation. Finally he burst out: “They 
are doing it to avoid active military service, the damned 
little Jids.” He caught himself. “Dear old man, I 
didn’t mean to offend you. But as a matter of fact it’s 
my old classmate Joe Benjamin who’s called my atten- 
tion to the fact.” 

I didn’t doubt my friend’s word. Of course it was 
the super-patriotic assimilationist Jew who, trying to 
justify his American existence, had characterized the 
Eastern Jews as slackers. In his measureless folly and 
ignorance he did not know that these youths had fled 
the master State and the horrors of military servitude 
hoping to find in America a higher type of civilization, 
that their political thought and action was thus beyond 
his reach, that he was the barbarian, playing the game of 
a barbarian world which they—cultural nationalists, 
pacifists, economic codperators—had long transcended. 
He despised them. He communicated his contempt to 
his Gentile friend, in whose eyes he desired to be as much 
of a belligerent Aryan as he could feign to be... . 
Need I add that the propitiatory belligerency of the 
Benjamins has not availed them? Is not their folly and 
its failure a thrice-told tale in every Western country? 
The youths from Russia and Poland are not trying to 
get into Gentile clubs on their war-record. They are 
Jews and are serving the world as Jews. They may end 


by saving the West from itself. ... 
[ 109 ] 





ISRAEL 


Vv 


The actual conditions that obtain in the Polish state 
could be described at very great length. Example could 
be heaped upon example to illustrate that régime of con- 
summate cruelty and icy fraud. But a detailed account 
would demand a separate treatise. It will suffice to 
sum up the facts here by means of a single document of 
unquestioned authenticity and irresistible force. 

The Jewish members of the Polish Diet, deprived of 
all legislative influence through the complete isolation 
forced upon them by the parties of the Left as well as 
of the Right, formed a parliamentary “kolo” or club. 
On the 10th of December, 1924, Deputy Schreiber, in— 
the name of the Jewish Parliamentary Club, read the 
following declaration in the Diet in order to ground the 
refusal of the Jewish Deputies to vote in favor of an 
additional budget. (Bulletin du Comité des Déléga- 
tions jguives, No. 27, 5 April, 1925.) 

“The entire political system and the methods em- 
ployed by the Government have up to the present done 
nothing but aggravate in the most cruel and un- 
paralleled manner the economic ruin and cultural 
oppression of the Jewish population of Poland. Any 
hope of improvement which that population ever enter- 
tained has long been annihilated. Such have been the 
actual practices of the present Government that what- 
ever small faith the Jewish population ever placed in 
the good-will of the administration, has faded, and any 
confidence of obtaining the civil equality guaranteed by 
the laws of the Republic has disappeared. 

“Not only has the Government failed to abrogate an 

[110 ] 


HOUSE OF BONDAGE 


entire series of legal enactments which it inherited from 
the Russian régime, which, being in full force, impair 
the equality of Jews before the law and which are, con- 
sequently, flagrant contradictions of the Polish con- 
stitution; not only has the Government failed to give 
any satisfaction to those nationalistic rights guaranteed 
the Jews by both the constitution and international 
treaties, but it has also made no effort to put an end to 
the conditions of chaotic disorder in that restricted self- 
government of the religious communities which, by 
virtue of the old laws, the Jews have been able to retain. 

“Nor is this all. ‘The Government ordered elections 
to take place in Jewish communities. At the same time 
and despite contrary promises it tolerated the sabotage 
of these elections on the part of the local authorities, a 
practice which discredits the entire legal structure of the 
Polish state. In most localities and everywhere in 
Galicia the local authorities have thus succeeded in 
rendering utterly impossible the constitution of repre- 
sentative bodies to carry out the will of the people. In 
Congress Poland the same result has been obtained by 
provoking a useless conflict in regard to the question 
of what language should be employed in the necessary 
public meetings. 

“Nor has the Government made the slightest effort 
to aid so much as the beginning of self-government 
among the Jewish population of the border provinces 
of the East. 

“In the realm of culture and education the Govern- 
ment has systematically followed its adopted policy 
which is either to ignore or to stifle the needs of the 


Jewish population. The government has not been sat- 
[-111] 


ISRAEL 


isfied with a total neglect of the duties incumbent upon 
it in this matter; it has not merely neglected in its budg- 
etary appropriations to take into consideration the edu- 
cational needs of the Jewish population and especially 
of already existing Jewish schools. It has gone to the 
extent of destroying and tolerating the destruction of 
schools created and supported by the private means of 
the Jewish people. ‘These schools have been closed, 
their grounds and buildings have been requisitioned; 
they have been the objects of endless chicaneries. And 
it was undoubtedly meant as an evil jest at the expense 
of the Jews of Poland that in its last budget the Gov- 
ernment appropriated the ridiculous sum of 10,000 zloty 
($2,000) as a contribution to the religious expenditures 
of a population of over three millions of its citizens. 

“In direct violation of the provisions of the constitu- 
tion the Government tolerates the use of restrictions 
which practically prevent the access of Jews to the 
universities and technical schools. Jewish youths who 
wish to leave the country to pursue their studies are 
subjected to every conceivable annoyance. If they com- 
plete their studies abroad they are met by equally 
aggravating delays and chicaneries in the matter of 
having their diplomas officially acknowledged. A. chain 
is thus being forged that has no purpose but to enfeeble 
the intellectual capacities of the Jews. 

“In the domain of economics the Government’s policy 
of deliberate extirpation has been pushed to the last 
extreme. That economic and fiscal policy has suc- 
ceeded in bringing about the indescribable impoverish- 
ment of the broad masses of Jewry who literally suc- 
cumb under the weight of these exactions and are utterly 

(112 ] 


HOUSE OF BONDAGE 


hopeless of the possibility of amelioration. In its blind- 
ness the Government may not be aware of the fact that 
its methods are mercilessly destroying the existence of 
tens of thousands of citizens of the Polish state. But 
it is not necessary to assume blindness. Since the 
citizens in question are Jews, the Government recoils 
from no consequences. 

“The workshops and offices of the State are closed to 
the Jewish worker and intellectual. Jewish employees 
of long years’ standing are pitilessly discharged from 
establishments taken over by the Government in the 
pursuit of its recent policy of monopolies. 

“The governmental order issued to an entire group 
of towns in the Warsaw region according to which all 
fairs must take place on Saturday, is clearly another 
means toward the deliberate end of completely destroy- 
ing Jewish commerce. 

“As a striking example of this entire system we may 
point to the monstrous project of taking away from tens 
of thousands of families, mostly Jewish, the licenses 
which they have often held for generations and which 
constitute their sole means of subsistence. This scheme 
is defended on the ground of the State’s obligation 
to war veterans. 

“The Jewish Parliamentary Club is fully aware of 
the rights of veterans and invalids to receive a sufficient 
pension from the State. But this obligation to satisfy 
the demands of justice and the necessity of the veterans 
should be charged upon the population as a whole, above 
all, upon the wealthier classes. Under no pretext should 


the entire burden be imposed upon one specific class of 
[113 ] 


ISRAEL 


citizens, especially when this class is already notoriously 
impoverished. 

“Tf this project is carried through it will constitute a 
brutal assault against the very foundations of the exist- 
ence of the Jewish population and in the name of that 
population we protest with all possible energy.’ 

“The Jewish Parliamentary Club, finally, desires to 
express the conviction that the pacification of the eastern 
provinces can be accomplished only if the needs of all 
the elements of their population, including the Jewish, 
be satisfied. It is clear from many complaints that the 
Government systematically violates the constitutional 
right of these nationalities to use their languages. In 
Eastern Galicia there are in circulation secret orders of 
the ministry forbidding the use of the Jewish language 
in public meetings. Methods such as these are cal- 
culated, of course, to undermine all faith in the Gov- 
ernment. Local authorities know perfectly well that 
they will be upheld. But there is no occasion for being 
surprised at this state of affairs when one realizes that 
the inspiration behind them comes from the highest 
authorities of the State, when one remembers the 
declaration of the supreme chief of the State to the effect 
that anyone who publicly instigates crime or has been 
duly condemned by the courts for crimes committed 
need have no fear for his liberty since the prisons are 
already packed. 

“For the reasons here adduced the Jewish Parliamen- 
tary Club can have no confidence in the Government 
and will cast its votes against an extension of the 
budget.” 


* The protest has proved futile. 
| [114] 


HOUSE OF BONDAGE 


VI 


“Confidence in the Government. ...” What these 
pale and restrained phrases cover is a great tragedy and 
a great passion. It is the tragedy of the Vilna Ghetto, 
of a hundred Ghettos even more terrible and obscure; 
it is the tragedy of the fugitives in every harbor of 
Europe; it is also a great passion—the passion and the 
somber glow of that last scene I witnessed and carried 
away forever in my mind from Warsaw... . 

Through the ill-lt streets we rumbled in our tight 
little Droschken. In passing, one could see the shadowy 
outline of the tall monument of Adam Mickiewicz, the 
Polish national poet. In an often quoted passage of 
his best-known work he had saluted the Jew as a brother. 
It is a very sore point with the Poles. He, too, is in 
the shadow, like his monument. . . . We crossed the 
Vistula, river of blood and tears. They have thrown 
corpses into it for centuries. For a time its West 
Prussian banks were at peace. Today there is no tell- 
ing when that historic pastime will begin again as the 
river flows through the Polish corridor past Danzig 
into the Baltic Sea... . 

Dim tree-tops stir in the cool wind. We take a rather 
roundabout way. One of the bridges was blown up dur- 
ing the war. The cobble-stones become more and more 
jagged. At last we stop. Our Droschken join a large 
semi-circle of others. ... We plunge into a dark, 
streaming crowd. Jews, all Jews. Long caftans and 
caps; modern clothes out of little shops. Not only old 
men in caftans, but boys and youngsters. No very 
long ear-locks here. Some concession is made to 

[ 115 ] 


ISRAEL 


modernity in the city. The beards are long, however, 
and but for some red Judas physiognomy here and there, 
the faces, especially of the old and older men, have a 
grave and noble beauty. Thus Rembrandt saw them; 
thus they are today. ‘The women are less definitely 
marked in character. Only here and there are glimpses 
of shapely profiles. 

It is not an orderly crowd. But its disorder is quite 
without violence. Some passion stirs it, however, some 
impulse that lifts 1t above its workaday self. Are these 
the people that walk the Warsaw streets so quietly, so 
sadly? Are these the old men of the Ghetto streets, 
these the haggling slatterns of a thousand shops, these 
the caftaned boys who rather hug the walls when the 
sun shines? 

They throng toward the platform of the railroad sta- 
tion. Most of them in vain. Only those who have 
tickets are admitted. ‘This is not an unreasonable regu- 
lation. But for it all the half-million Jews in Warsaw 
would be here tonight. Intellectually they are dis- 
united. ‘There are parties and parties. Nevertheless 
they would be here tonight. Assimilationism of any 
kind is dead here—dead forever. The Poles, as we have 
seen, have taken good care of that. The nine-hundred- 
year-old sharing of earth and sun and bread and 
vicissitude and fighting against a common enemy and 
oppressor can count no more. So what are parties 
opinions, divisions? All Jewish Warsaw is here in body 
or in spirit tonight. ‘Two hundred people are being 
entrained on their way to Constanza, where they take 
ship, on their way out of bondage, on their way to Eretz 
Jisroel—the land of the fathers. ... 

[ 116 ] 


HOUSE OF BONDAGE 


The blue-coated Polish policemen with their long 
swords are impassive. Impassive and a little surly. 
Their duty tonight rather disgusts them. They are 
accustomed to inspiring fear, at least a nervous shrink- 
ing. Tonight, despite their authority, which cannot be 
denied, they simply do not exist. The spirit of the 
crowd has risen above them. .. . 

We have tickets, of course, and are under competent 
guidance. But we, too, are sent with calculated rude- 
ness from one gate to another. . . . At last we are on 
the platform, in the midst of an even intenser crowd— 
a crowd whose faces are a little pale under the dim lights. 
Pale but uplifted. For here are the people who are 
actually going and here are their fathers and mothers, 
their brothers and sisters, who will probably never see 
them again, but who are glad to give them up out of the 
darkness into the light and out of degradation to 
spiritual erectness. If they themselves cannot see 
Jerusalem, it is well that these others may; if they must 
await the pogroms to come, it is well that so many are 
saved. 

So many. So few. This thing that we are witness- 
ing is a weekly occurrence. About two hundred people 
leave each week. But in the files of the Palestine office 
you see that there are ten thousand applications a week. 
Why are there so few out of so many? ‘The answer to 
that question isin America... . 

The train stands beside the platform and the leader 
from the Palestine office is busy getting his people on 
board. He accompanies them to the Rumanian border, 
sees to it that they are not cheated nor delayed through 


passport or visa chicaneries, nor suffer violence nor rob- 
[ 117 ] 


ISRAEL 


bery. At the border another leader takes his place, who 
accompanies and protects the group to its final destina- 
tion. | 

Our Warsaw leader is a model of quiet efficiency. 
In half an hour he has his people in their proper com- 
partments. No bundles must be lost and no children 
misplaced. For only one third of today’s group con- 
sists of young men and women, of Chaluzim, or pioneers. 
The rest are families who have the necessary minimum 
of capital which entitles them to go to Palestine. The 
heads of the families are carpenters, locksmiths, expert 
workmen in the building trades. They are more than 
that. ‘They are idealists and, in a sense, scholars. For 
they are all speakers of Hebrew, in addition to Polish 
and Yiddish, and they have all liberated their minds. 
from the restraints and inhibitions of the current 
orthodoxy and have seen an unheard-of vision and had 
the hardihood to break through a thousand shackles, 
overcome a thousand difficulties on their way to this 
tremendous adventure. ... 

We leave the ladies of our party tucked in a safe cor- 
ner and my guide from the Palestine office and I make 
our way through the crowd and go into one packed 
compartment after another to speak to those who are 
going. The third-class compartments are barren and 
comfortless and the long journey, followed by the 
steerage passage on an emigrant ship, is in itself enough 
to appal the Western mind. And these emigrants are 
not the Ellis Island type. Here are no fugitives. Let 
that be made as clear as possible. We speak to men and 
to women and touch the heads of children. These people 
will suffer on the trip, and the hardships of the land to 

[ 118 ] 


HOUSE OF BONDAGE 


which they are going will be real hardships to them. 
But they are sustained by what is within; they are sus- 
tained by the thought that their children will not be the 
helots of barbarians... . 

A single carriage of first-class compartments heads 
the train. The doors are still open, and outside of them 
stand the Polish officers who are to occupy the com- 
partments. They try to keep their faces expressionless. 
But as they stand there or walk up and down trailing 
their long swords you get from them an indefinable 
moral atmosphere. They are contemptuous and yet 
amazed. Something here does not fit in with their cal- 
culations. Something. ... What is it? It is this, 
that the outcasts and the hunted and the oppressed that 
are here have undergone a profound change. They are 
as powerless physically as ever. Morally they are no 
longer so. For from the middle of the train flutters a 
little flag of blue and white—a flag that represents no 
guns or battalions or frontiers or force or fraud, a flag 
that represents no aspiration after power, only a hope, 
only an act of spiritual self-recollection. But that is 
enough. The flag is there. And with the flag the song. 
And slowly, a little hoarsely at first, then with rising 
energy and fervor, the crowd sings the Hatikvah, the 
song of that hope, of that aspiration. .. . 

The Polish officers enter their compartments; the 
doors of the other compartments are closed too. 
Against the panes of the windows, close to the panes, 
are the faces of our people—men and women and little 
children. The faces on the platform, silently turned to 
those others, are strained but calm and self-controlled. 
From an open compartment-window a young Chaluz is 

[ 119 ] 


TSRAEL 


quietly saying a few words in Hebrew to those who must 
remain behind in Galuth, in the terrible Galuth of 
Poland. But there is no sentimentality, no excess of 
feeling. The hour is too tremendous for that. Two 
thousand years are gone, are swept away. ‘This year 
here,” the fathers have said for generations and genera- 
tions, “this year here, next year in Yerushelayim!” 
That next year has come. . . . Slowly the train pulls 
out of the dim station. A single sob is heard from a 
woman on the platform. Then no more. Only the 
strains of the Hatikvah, only the restrained melody of 
the song of hope, and here and there a final word of both 
farewell and salutation, the best word, the only word— 
Shalom, which means peace. 


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CHAPTER IV 
LAND OF ISRAEL 


I 


TuE change from West to East is abrupt and com- 
plete. The edge of Atlantic winds reaches Warsaw; 
at Trieste the sky touches the top of the steep little Via 
del Monte; the young Jewish pioneers who trundle 
their luggage down that street are bare-headed; their 
shirts are open at the throat; a wind furrows their dark 
hair; their eyes seek the half-naked hills that jut out 
into the Adriatic. Night may bring the rainy Hyades; 
ships in the harbor have passed the Acroeeraunian walls. 

A world begins here which is, in truth, neither West 
nor East. It is that old, old Mediterranean world which 
is one, which saw all the beginnings of history, which 
gave birth to all the arts, to all the wisdom by which man 
lives, which has changed little, careless of millenniums, 
deaf to tumult. The naked cliffs of Crete, more myth 
than island, are mauve and tan in the translucent air, 
rough and yet shapely as the Judean hills. <At 
Brindisi, above a sordid little harbor street with shops 
aping the North, rise a palm and a Roman column, clear, 
definite, yet soft against the sky, solitary and slender 
as obelisk or minaret, careless of giving shade or shelter 
in this light-flooded world. 

The ship belongs to all worlds. It is a hired go-be- 


tween. There are merchants from Germany, thoroughly 
[121 ] 


ISRAEL 


well-informed, but not likely to bring home more than 
they brought with them. There are handsome likable 
British youths going out to Colonial jobs and appoint- 
ments, jolly and essentially supercilious. ‘There is a 
family from Sedalia, Missouri, on a Cook’s tour. They 
cannot tell you precisely why they came so far. But 
some day there will be a paper read before a woman’s 
club in Sedalia about Bible lands. ‘The excellent hus- 
band and father is delighted at the cheapness of whisky 
and soda on board and tells how he made his little pile 
lending money to farmers. 'There is a morose pasha 
whose emaciated daughter wears her conventional West- 
ern clothes like a masker’s costume. There is a suave 
and Europeanized pasha who flirts in equally good 
French and English. There is an elderly cloak and suit 
manufacturer who lives in the Bronx and has, a little 
shyly, slipped away from his assimilated family to get 
a glimpse of the land of Israel. At morn the passengers, 
half-surreptitiously, glance toward the plunging steer- 
age deck. A group of stern, bearded Jews appears. 
Their phylactery boxes project from their foreheads; 
they are draped in their great, grayish praying-shawls. 
They rock back and forth and chant the words their 
fathers chanted centuries before England had a name. 
They, at least, are not going East. ‘They never left the 
Mediterranean world. ‘The voyage is less to them than 
a pin-prick. To them dream and reality were never 
divided. They are going from Jerusalem to Jerusalem. 
They know where to find the tomb of Maimonides and 
the house of study by the boiling springs on the shores 
of Lake Kinnereth. 

It is not so simple for everyone. The tourists and 

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LAND OF ISRAEL 


merchants bring eyes and minds and leave their souls 
at home. Their case is not complicated. But how is it 
with the pioneers, the Chaluzim whose songs are heard 
from the steerage at twilight? Now that they are on 
their way, it may be that landscapes of the North haunt 
them—pools in autumnal forests covered with leaves of 
bronze, upland meadows, cities by stormier waters with 
their lights at dusk. The Chaluzim are going East and 
South in no light fashion. They are putting off a 
spiritual garment that chafed and ached. But it had 
been long worn and its very imperfections were familiar. 
A garment—a world. They have entered the Mediter- 
ranean sun, the illimitable sun. If their adventure is 
to be a triumph, their souls must melt into a new earth 
and a new heaven and the sight of the flat roofs and 
white towers of Alexandria must be to them the begin- 
ning of the end of a journey home. 

The first plunge into Alexandria is wild and fantastic. 
The Arab burden-bearers swarm in swirls of disorder, 
raising a coldly passionate clamor. F'ezzes and turbans 
and tattered cloaks of red and blue and orange reel in a 
strange rout. An old Arab, all wrinkled skin and taut 
sinews, one-eyed, bent double, obsequious with ten 
thousand years of slavery, swings a mountain of luggage 
on his back and rushes forward cursing all who obstruct 
his path. The burden-bearers, the custom-sheds, the 
train, the wayside glimpses—fields, villages, cities, even 
the Nile; these are to the thoughtful eye as yet not 
Egypt, not Mizraim, not the house of bondage. Here 
is part of the wide domain of the Muslims, of the Arabs 
whose storytellers told the immortal tales of thousand 
and one nights, of the folk who still sit in calm places 

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ISRAEL 


in the cool of the evening telling tales and matching 
rimes. ‘Theirs is Alexandria, theirs Cairo with its tombs 
of the Caliphs, with the narrow, clamorous streets of the 
Mousky where in the alley of the goldsmiths a hundred 
artificers mold the soft, intensely yellow metal on little 
ringing anvils. Here the Arab ladies throng to buy 
their golden chains and hangings. They are not 
swathed in black veils as the orthodox demand. ‘They 
have reduced modesty to the symbol of a bit of trans- 
parent white fabric covering mouth and chin. 

But an hour from here is the edge of the desert. 
Among the white dunes of the sand and the rubble of 
the ages rise the pyramids and on the road that leads 
to the desert and the tombs there begins the life of the 
road, that life of the road that has changed little since 
the vast tombs were built. Women on donkeys or in 
ox-carts, clad in dusty black robes, men in green and 
blue oncamels. Others on foot driving their black, long- 
haired goats before them. ALI leisurely with an infinite 
leisure. They walk or ride their slow beasts along the 
dusty, glaring road as if there were no time. 

This is Kgypt, this and the tombs and the memorials 
that have been brought from the tombs: golden jewels 
of kings and priests and princesses, alabaster libation 
tablets and urns, models of ships and shops, the incom- 
parable statues in stone and wood that were ancient of 
years when Jacob sought a Pharaoh’s favor, the throne 
and bed and caskets and intricately carved vases of 
alabaster that served the uses of Tutankhamen. This 
is Egypt. The Egypt of a gorgeous little upper-class, 
like that of our own owners of castles and sea-going 
yachts and private railroad cars. Once a Jew named 

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LAND OF ISRAEL 


Joseph climbed into this class. Centuries later a Jew 
named Moses slipped by a legendary accident into the 
same class and was considered the son of the daughter 
of Pharaoh. ... 

I stood in the museum at Cairo and contemplated the 
remains of an elaborate and splendid world. Here was 
a completely equipped civilization. It lacked science: 
it was not articulate in speech. But its sculpture and 
architecture were of the first order. Its instinct for the 
plastic was faultless, down to the design and execution 
of the humblest utensil of daily use. Into this civiliza- 
tion, as into many another since, the children of Israel 
were invited. They prospered and increased in num- 
bers, as they have done many times since in many lands, 
and doubtless were good Egyptian subjects, loyal and 
patriotic. This state of affairs is said to have lasted 
for about four hundred years. By that time the pros- 
perity and number of the Israelites excited the envy and 
the fear of the Egyptians and an anti-Israelitish agita- 
tion began. The fear was expressed that these strangers 
would become “too many and too mighty” for the 
natives of older stocks and, by the drastic action of a 
barbarous polity, the Israelites were reduced to the 
status of slaves. We may be sure that they had friends 
and defenders, that, having intermarried with Egyptians 
during the four centuries of their presence in the 
land, they had kinsmen among the members of the rul- 
ing race. But the fear of the predatory tribe was too 
great. For it may happen, the stout Kgyptian patriots 
plead, “that when there falleth out any war, they also 
join themselves unto our enemies and fight against us.” 


And so the classical cry against a minority was sounded 
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ISRAEL 


for the first time in recorded history, and a blank 
unanimity and uniformity was announced as the ideal of 
the political and warlike state. .. . 

To these lives now “made bitter with hard service” 
Moses was probably not the only exception. No doubt 
there were Israelites of wealth and position who by 
giving bribes or by embracing the state religion saved 
themselves from the “anguish of spirit” and the “cruel 
bondage”’ of their brethren. They probably took good 
care to have their children marry into one-hundred-per- 
cent Egyptian families and thus provided for the 
security of themselves and their posterity by merging 
themselves with the majority. Moses was, of course, 
in an exceptionably favorable position. He was a mem- 
ber of the court and thus wholly removed from the 
possibility of attack. But “when he was grown up he 
went out unto his brethren and looked on their burdens.” 
He slew one of their Egyptian tormentors, despite the 
recorded meekness of his nature; he fled only to return 
as the leader and savior of his people, steadfast, ma- 
jestic, greatly enduring, careless of happiness or con- 
tent for himself, destined to die and lie in an unknown 
sepulcher after that one glance from Nebo across the 
glistening waters of the Dead Sea to the Judean hills 
beyond. ... 

Whatever this story be—history or fable—is it not 
the eternal symbol of a recurring fate? The argument 
that the Egyptians used against the Israelites, do not 
the Poles and Hungarians and Rumanians use it to- 
day? Did we not use it against every racial or spiritual 
minority in the days of the great war? Is it not the sym- 
bol of a sin at the core of life and of a necessary redemp- 

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LAND OF ISRAEL 


tion? The delusion that war is necessary nourishes the 
delusion that minorities must be absorbed or crushed. 
It was so in Egypt; it is so today. Thence springs a 
meaning deeper than he dreamed from the words of 
that Chassidic rabbi who exclaimed: ‘Lord of the world, 
redeem Israel! But if thou wilt not, redeem the 
Gentiles!’ The redemption of Israel and the redemp- 
tion of mankind are one. 

The way goes Eastward still. At Kantara a little 
ferry crosses the Suez Canal from Africa to Asia. The 
train winds into the wilderness of Sinai. Blinding white 
sand in hills and mounds, in graceful curves and slopes. 
On the sand is the exquisitely patterned tracery of the 
winds. ‘The direct light pours down. A shadowless 
ocean of light. Here and there tufts of wilted grass 
or herb, enough to feed a few camels, a few hardy black 
goats. At long intervals a spring or a group of springs. 
Are they the springs of Elim? For here too are three- 
score and ten palm-trees. They are date-palms and the 
yellowish clustered fruits hang below the spreading 
leaves. The sea is not far from here. Perhaps it is 
Marah where the waters were bitter and trees were cast 
into the water to make it sweet. The Arabs still cast 
trees into the bitter waters here, as Moses bade his 
people do. Then the salt crystallizes about the boughs 
and the bitterness of the waters grows less. . . . 

Elim and Marah are left behind and Horeb, the holy 
mountain, and soon the desert on which the manna fell 
—‘‘small as the hoar-frost on the ground’’—is passed. 
Hills come and the rumor of ancient cities: Gaza, where 
was the border of the Canaanite and later the Philistine 
stronghold and shrine of Dagon; where Samson turned 

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ISRAEL 


the mill as the asses and camels do to this day and then 
brought the god’s temple down upon himself and the 
adversaries of his people. Here are the vale of Sorek 
and the cave in which Delilah beguiled Samson; here 
the valley in which Israelite and Philistine confronted 
each other and young David, shepherd and poet, shot 
the stone from his sling... . 

The hills of Juda. . . . Once groves of the olive, 
the fig, the pomegranate stretched to their summits. 
Today the slopes and summits are barren and the great 
light beats upon them. ‘The ancient terraces are still 
to be seen. But they are ruined and their stones clutter 
the sides of the hills. Cave after cave. Arabs live in a 
few. A woman in a dusty blue cloak comes out of one 
and lifts the water jar upon her head. Yellow sheep 
and black goats clamber near a few sun-baked Arab 
huts. No tree or bush or shade. Only the grim, con- 
torted cactus here and there. ... 

A barren land. Barren hills. Yet there are no hills 
in the world quite like these hills and mountains of 
Judea. There are few deep valleys; there are few 
gorges. There is little variety and hence little beauty. 
There is an even sublimity of height. The hills aspire 
in this land; they throng toward the sky; when night 
comes the heavy, clustered, unimaginably crowded stars 
hang about their summits as the fruit of the grape hangs 
upon the vine. ... 

The forty years’ journey is made ina day. The chil- 


dren of Israel continued their march northeast toward — 


Hebron and the Dead Sea and the towers of Jericho. 
The train hugs the coast, goes a little northward to 


Ludd, then east toward Jerusalem... . 
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LAND OF ISRAEL 


It was long before Israel reached this city. And 
even when Joshua, the son of Nun, came there with his 
men he could not conquer the stronghold of the 
Jebusites. Not until David came did Israel possess the 
holy hill-top on which Abraham went to sacrifice his only 
son to God. Israel did not possess the hill-top long and 
does not possess it today. But cities do not matter, nor 
walls nor temples nor the tops of holy hills. Before the 
desert was crossed, before Hebron was taken or the 
walls of Jericho had toppled, Israel had become Israel. 
In the desert, in the barren places, a people had said to 
itself: “Thou shalt not take vengeance nor bear any 
grudge against the children of thy people; but thou shalt 
love thy neighbor as thyself. And if a stranger so- 
journ with thee in your land, ye shall not do him wrong. 
The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you 
as the homeborn among you, and thou shalt love him as 
thyself; for ye were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” 
From its first exile Israel had learned the lesson that 
mankind still waits to learn... . 

Jerusalem. ... 


II 

The city upon which the eyes of the world have been 
turned for so long is a city built upon hills. From the 
remotest times the altars of God were set up in the high 
places. Also the primitive hill-folk who prayed at these 
altars found the tops of the hills the best places of 
defense against attack. The corresponding danger was 
that of drought. Water is hard to come by in Jerusalem 


to this day. But the habit of building on the hills lies 
{ 125) 


ISRAEL 


in the atmosphere of the land. Instinctively the mind 
fronts the sun by day and the stars by night. The new 
Jewish suburbs Talpioth and Beth Hakerem are on 
windswept hills and the modern landscape architect and 
city builder follows the methods of the ancients who 
terraced the slopes all through Judea. From every 
window in Jerusalem that lies beyond the walls the eye 
looks from height to height. The valleys are narrow 
and shallow. The city is spreading in all directions, but 
by a profound impulse the vision turns eastward to 
the heights of Mount Scopus, and the Mount of Olives, 
and to the hills of Moab far beyond. 

The newer quarters and institutions lie West and 
Northwest, so that one generally sees the old, walled 
town from that direction and enters it by either the 
Jaffa or the Damascus gate. These gates with their 
pointed arches are the gates of the citadel which Sulei- 
man the Magnificent built about Jerusalem early in the 
sixteenth century. The massive walls and soaring out- 
look tower are well-preserved. Wiaithin the courtyards 
of the fortification the stone has crumbled in many 
places; one walks over masses of rubble and climbs to 
the outlook-tower over ruined stairs. An endless spiral 
staircase hewn of solid stone leads to the top of the 
tower. ‘Thence, sharply outlined in the luminous at- 
mosphere, appear the black Dome of the Rock dom- 
inating the city, churches and monasteries, the hills 
and, in the ultimate distance a glittering disk which > 
is the Dead Sea, a thread of silver which is the 
Jordan. 

Neither from the tower of the citadel nor from any 
hill-top does one see a Jewish dome or spire. The walls 

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LAND OF ISRAEL 


of the citadel are built upon Herodian foundations; but 
these are sunk fathoms deep in earth. Stones fashioned 
by the workmen of Herod, perhaps even by the builders 
of the second Temple are among the nineteen buried 
layers beneath the present West wall of what was once 
the enclosure of the Temple. The debris of the ages has 
filled this spot that was once a valley to a depth of 
thirteen meters. The tombs of the Judges are to the 
North, of the prophets to the South, burial caves sur- 
round the city. Southeast of the city, on the north 
slope of the Mount of Corruption is a Jewish graveyard 
of great antiquity. The headstones are broken; shards 
and rubble are as deep as they were when Nehemiah 
returned from Babylon and found the city so ruined 
that there was no place for the beast that was under him 
to pass. But of the monuments of life from the days of 
our kingdom nothing is left. 

The old city within the walls of the citadel of 
Suleiman is, except for the Temple place on its South- 
eastern edge, demonstrably not the city of David at all. 
That lay to the South, dominated the vale of Kidron and 
was refreshed by the pool and brook of Siloam. It was 
from here that David went up the hill of Moriah and 
bought the top of the hill of Araunah, the Jebusite, 
who had turned it into a threshing-floor. David built 
an altar to Jehovah on that spot which was later to 
be the Temple of Solomon and the site of the Second 
Temple. 

East and Northeast of the old city of David the road 
winds through a narrow valley. It passes the Mount 
of Corruption on which Solomon built altars to the gods 
of his strange wives; it passes through the vale of 

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ISRAEL 


Jehosophat; it passes those three mysterious and 
immemorial monuments which are half hidden in the 
rocky hill-side. Are they the pillar that Absalom reared 
him in the king’s dale and the house of Osias and the 
tomb of Zechariah, the prophet? Are the Hellenistic 
columns on all three and the Kgyptian cone on the tomb 
of Absalom later additions to monuments already 
ancient? It matters little. To the left of the road is 
the wall of the citadel. A few dusky cypresses wave 
beside it. To the right, beyond the tombs the hill rises 
first gradually, then more loftily to the heights of Mount 
Scopus whence always the conquerors besieged the city, 
to the heights of the Mount of Olives. And road and 
valley, and hill-slopes are filled with the rubble of the 
ages. Stones... stones... not the stones of the 
field which cover all this land. But stones hewn and 
graven once by the hands of men, hewn and graven by 
the workmen of Israel, built and always destroyed. The 
chronicle of conquest upon conquest is written here. 
And always Israel succumbed except that once when 
the hand of God stayed Sennacherib. Always was 
Israel conquered. Victory of the sword was never our 
portion nor strong walls our effectual defense. Ruins 
are our monuments. Ruins—except for the immortal 
spirit that broods here despite a hundred conquests, 
except for the spirit that, in this evening of time, has 
brought us here again. 

The old town within the walls of the citadel is crowded - 
with houses. The streets are three or four yards wide 
and fantastically crooked. ‘They are rarely level for 
more than ten feet. Steps lead up, steps lead down. 
Everywhere arches span the narrowest alleys. When 

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LAND OF ISRAEL 


the sunshine filters into the streets, the wells of radiance 
are cut by the sharp, large shadows of house and arch, 
man and beast. At night feeble lanterns twinkle at the 
doors of houses and synagogues and one walks, but for 
an occasional glint of starlight between roofs and arches, 
asin catacombs. By day the scene in the alleys is busy. 
There are markets and shops and cafés and the open 
bazaars of the Orient. The dignified idle Arabs, in fezzes 
or turbans and many colored, shabby robes, sit or crouch 
in the open cafés, smoking their nargilehs. Here in the 
wall is a potter at his primitive wheel; yonder is an oil- 
press turned as of old by a small, rough-coated ass. 
Arab women go by, holding their well-wrought water 
jugs beautifully upon their heads. Next comes a vendor 
of flat cakes or of sweets. Next a small, mobile, dark 
Sephardic Jew and behind him a giant—old, severe, 
Rembrandtesque—from far Galicia in a robe of bronze- 
colored velvet and a round, fur-brimmed hat. 'There 
are monks: Russians in tall birettas, Armenians in black 
hoods, Dominicans and Capuchins of the Western 
Church. There are Arab children and Arab beggars; 
and suddenly with rhythmic swing comes a gaunt, slow, 
tawny camel and throws its crooked shadow against arch 
and wall. 

In the strictly Jewish streets the shops are neater 
and the crowd is more orderly. But the division is not 
sharp. In front of the court-yard of a massive syna- 
gogue stands an Arab holding a shy and fragile gazelle 
in leash. The houses are the same, the stones are the 
same. When the eve of the Sabbath comes it is from 
all parts of the old city that Jews stream through the 


prison-like walls of the settlement of the Moroccan 
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ISRAEL 


Muslims to that harsh, stony, cramped enclosure which 
faces all that is left them of the brief days of their 
national splendor: the West wall of the Temple, the 
Wall of Wailing. 

The stones rise, layer upon layer. So huge are the 
stones that a tall man faces the middle of the second 
layer. ‘Their beveled edges are crumbled here and 
there; tufts of grayish grass grow out of the interstices. 
Hither the pious exiles of the House of Israel have come 
to mourn through the ages. Rome fell and Byzantium; 
America was discovered; great states arose and were 
cast down, the bugles and the tramplings of a hundred 
wars and persecutions passed by—passed by like a 
shadow, like a dream. Hither the exiles came to mourn 
—not for a Temple destroyed or a city taken or the 
passing of power, but for the menaced integrity of the 
spiritual life of a scattered nation. Hither they still 
come. Old men and women in the garb of the East 
of Europe. And some in white robes, and some 
wrapped in praying-shawls. Young men and women 
too in the dress of modern workers. They pray and 
chant with a rhythmic fervor, with a terrible aspiration. 
They will wring their rights from a stubborn universe. 
. . . More peacefully they kiss the stones. A crumpled, 
inconceivably old woman in apron and head-kerchief. 
passes in and out of the crowd offering men and women 
the refreshment of a whiff of sweet and pungent herbs. 
She will take no alms for her service. It is the eve of | 
the Sabbath. ... 

Above, so far above that no glimpse of it can be caught 
here at the bottom of the twenty-four layers of rock 


that are visible, lies that spacious and magnificent 
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LAND OF ISRAEL 


rectangle in which stood the Temple, in which stand 
today and have stood for at least a thousand years 
the Dome of the Rock and the mosque of Al-Aqsa. 
The Moorish arcades, delicate yet strong, the slender 
cypresses, the raised central portion on which the Dome 
of the Rock stands, all serve to accentuate the free- 
dom and the beauty of this small plateau. No wonder 
that Solomon built his Temple here and Justinian a 
Basilica and the Muslims one of the most sacred of 
their shrines. Both of the mosques, though spoiled 
by unskilful restoration here and there, are of a dream- 
like loveliness. Mosaics and marbles and flower-like 
windows shimmer in the soft gloom of the great mosque. 
The columns are not all Moorish: the iron grill-work 
was left by the Crusaders; in the Al-Aqsa the Christian 
nave still dominates. Yet the final note is that of Moor- 
ish grace and elegance. It speaks the spirit of a civ- 
ilization that never had the mark of continuity or com- 
pleteness of power. It expresses little that belongs to 
the Palestinian Arab of today. Yet it is his and will 
remain his for all time. Whatever the future holds, 
we are content with the Wall of Wailing, the symbol of 
our exile and endurance; we are content with the stones 
of the field, the stones of the many barren fields of 
Palestine which no hand has touched for centuries, out 
of which we are building things better than temples— 
homes for men. 

The site of the Temple is not ours and the city is 
filled with the churches and the monasteries of the Chris- 
tians. Yet a modern and liberal Christian will feel, 


even as the Jew does, that Jerusalem, never abandoned 
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ISRAEL 


in spirit by us, is ours in fact once more. For the 
temples of mystic faiths are but historic monuments, 
like collections of beautiful old armor. And those who 
fear, or feign to fear for the Holy Places through a 
Jewish resettlement of Palestine, are not sufficiently 
aware of our rationalism of outlook. For generations 
innumerable we went to Jerusalem to pray and die. 
Those days are over; we go to work and live. . . 

Beyond the old walled city, beyond ruins, graves, 
temples, monuments, there is a new world. Stand on 
the Jaffa road in the great flood of light. All colors 
glow here—yellow and blue and orange turbans, the 
scarlet fez of an Arab on a donkey; the white shawls 
of the Bedouins of the desert gleam. But there are 
young men and women in the sobriety of Kuropean garb. 
They are the pioneers, the workers. And what they 
see is not shrine or sarcophagus, but stone to be quarried, 
fields to be digged, water and power to be brought into 
the wastes of this desolate land, new cities on hill-tops 
fronting the same old stars. They see a new Jerusalem, 
too. Not a city of mystic forms or golden stairs. A 
city of houses and parks and theaters and seats of learn- 
ing. The plans for that new city are laid and that city 
is being built. There are new houses and new quarters; 
there are schools and hospitals; there is the beauty of 
trees where for centuries no shade fell. 

Out in the limestone quarry Jews are lifting the 
stone from the earth—J ews who had done no such labor 
for two thousand years. And near the quarry and be- 
yond in the new quarters Jews are building houses. Un- 


til two years ago there was scarcely a Jewish builder 
[ 1386 | 


LAND OF ISRAEL 


in the world; there was no Jewish mason or stone-cutter. 
The charming Oriental houses adapted to modern needs 
which you see in Talpioth, in Beth Hakerem, houses on 
hills with graceful, arched verandas facing the imme- 
morial Jand—these houses are built by the hands of 
Jews. 

I went to the camp where the stone-masons live. The 
hand of the craftsman comes to understand and to love 
the material in which it works. They are polishing the 
limestone of Jerusalem. It gleams like marble; it is 
veined like marble. The craftsman becomes the artist. 
In front of the camp stood a tall, lithe, booted, bare- 
armed man with the head of a youthful prophet: deep- 
set eyes, tight black hair and short beard. Two years 
ago he was a law-student in Russia. He had never 
touched a chisel or a mallet. He began as a quarrier 
of stone. He stood there over a block of the polished 
limestone chiseling an urn. Everywhere you see those 
urns made by Jewish craftsmen. They have both dig- 
nity and beauty, both strength and’ grace. The tall 
man stood erect. He had no head-covering. He had 
grown into the land and its light, the stone of the land 
was living under his hands; he spoke, and the sonorous 
Hebrew sounded terse upon his tongue. 

East on the top of Scopus they are building too, 
these Jewish masons and cutters of stone. They are 
building the Hebrew University. The two completed 
buildings with their tall, airy rooms and arcades for cool- 
ness and vision stand in a grove of trees. Science is the 
first need of a new land, or in an old one that is to be 
reclaimed. ‘Thus the rooms of the university are labora- 

[137 ] 


ISRAEL 


tories today. Chemical, bio-chemical and micro-biologi- 
cal research is vigorously pursued. In the laboratories 
glisten the glass and steel of the most modern instru- 
ments from America and Germany. From these you 
turn to a window. The chemist or biologist who looks 
up sees in the distance the blue and mauve and brown 
hills of Moab. Nebo is one of the peaks—Nebo from 
which Moses saw the Promised Land. A little farther 
West lies the village in which Jeremiah was born and 
the hill where Samuel judged Israel and the city of 
Ai toward which Joshua once pointed his javelin. And 
from another window the vision embraces the Dead 
Sea like a great, glittering shield and the Jordan flow- 
ing between the hills. A micro-biologist bends over his 
test-tube. In the stable of an agricultural group in the 
valley of Jezreel the cattle are threatened with sickness. 
By the time that the sun sets over the Mediterranean 
the men of Jezreel must have an answer to their question 
of that morning: What ails their cattle; what are they to 
do? The answer will come to them. The man of science 
works with profound intensity. The land of Israel is 
waiting for his message; the dispersed of the house of 
Israel are waiting; the nations are waiting—none too 
friendly—for that message which shall help to reclaim 
the land. ... The new Jerusalem is not a city of temples 
and shrines. Let the Christians pray in their holy places 
and the Muslims guard forever the Dome of the Rock. 
Our holy place is the earth of the land and our city the 
city that we are building; our rock is the rock of work 
and vision which can be Scopus as well as Moriah, which 


ean be Tabor or Carmel by the sea.... 
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LAND OF ISRAEL 


III 


South and east of Jerusalem stretch desert lands and 
the cities are desert cities. KEiverywhere centuries of 
neglect and war and spoliation have ruined the country. 
And here nature has been in league with man, For 
here one is on the edge of the original desert which must 
be fought and kept within bounds. The olive trees are 
dusty here and even the shaggy goats few. The golden 
sand flies in clouds upon the roadway. The caravans 
travel by night. One awakes and hears the soft, for- 
lorn tinkle of the camel bells. Kiven the South and the 
lands about the Dead Sea can be reclaimed. The Arabs 
plant no trees and do not dig deep and the black tents 
of the Bedouins who live by raising camels and asses 
are here today and gone tomorrow. ‘They seek the few 
natural oases or follow the sparse grasses that push 
through the sand. Our people have planted trees and 
watered fields and raised grain and almonds as far 
south as Ruchamah near Gaza. But the Southeastern 
country up to the Jordan valley and the shore of the 
Dead Sea lies desolate. 

It lies desolate today. But straight East from Jeru- 
salem it has a grandeur that is, strictly speaking, incom- 
parable. On the road from Jerusalem to Jericho one 
understands the Torah and the prophets; one under- 
stands the temper of Israel—austerity and passionate 
wildness, melancholy and agonized aspiration, the im- 
mitigable moral earnestness. .. . The road winds in 
sudden semi-circles, in bold parabolas in and out among 
the hills from the heights of Jerusalem down into the 
valley of the Jordan. The imagination itself is stag- 

[ 18? 


ISRAEL 


gered by these curves that have been cut into the sides 
of the mountains. The white road flees ahead of the 
fleeing car. Suddenly it is gone—gone apparently 
down dread abysses. The car turns. Again the wild 
white road flees ahead .. . flees . . . The mountains 
tower. Barren primordial mountains tawny in the di- 
rect unendurable light. Mountains dead and yet dread- 
fully alive. Is this some great herd of gigantic beasts, 
of super-mastodons suddenly petrified here by an up- 
heaval in the storms of creation? Or were there citadels 
and domes here of the giants, the Anakim of old, over 
which suddenly was flung a scarce imaginable covering 
of velvet colored like the lions of the waste? ‘The folds 
of the hills are like the falling folds of fabric. The 
tops of the hills are round. The crust of the earth 
seems here not crumpled, riven, torn by a catastrophe 
in nature, but rounded, curved, built to awe the spirit 
of man.... 

Down and down the road plunges; the hills fall. Far 
East gleams a white structure. It is the Nebi Musa 
which the Arabs feign to be that sepulcher of Moses 
which no man knoweth. Here they come in pilgrimage, 
thousands of them. They come at the time of the Pass- 
over in subtle protest against the Jews in the land.... 
The road ends and the car plows its way through heavy 
sand. Gone are the hills. Amid low dunes and harsh 
bushes shy young camels disport themselves. ‘The tents 
of the Bedouins to whom they belong are hidden in the 
hills behind. Then the dunes fall away too. The Dead 
Sea lies ahead. 

A great inland lake. One can see the flat shore and 
farther the mountains that lie beyond in Trans-J ordania. 

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LAND OF ISRAEL 


South the sea stretches farther than eye can reach. A 
small heavy, sullen tide beats at one’s feet. The surface 
of the water glitters as though a thousand spear-pointed 
crystals floated on it. The world is drenched in light, 
swallowed by the light. In the unendurable whiteness it 
lies preternaturally still. We stoop to pick up pebbles 
on the shore of the sea, pebbles abraded into beautiful 
strange shapes. We leave the shadow of the car and 
stroll on to where a few Arab huts stand on poles. 
In front of the huts three or four Arabs are loading 
sacks of grain on the backs of the kneeling camels. 
On small boats the grain is brought across the sea from 
Trans-Jordania. Here it is sent Westward. The Arabs 
crouch in the sand. Their heavy robes are stiff with 
filth. Children appear. Already their eyes are infected, 
blear with trachoma. They offer us little slabs of salt 
from the sea. They cry; Baksheesh! All Arab children 
do. We give them a handful of piasters. They dis- 
appear. Again the preternatural stillness. . . . Some 
day this shore will be peopled. A great wealth of 
potash and salt lies in the Dead Sea; the grain could 
be carried on ships and, transshipped by rail. We could 
give the Arabs a decent wage and our physicians and 
nurses could heal the eyes of their children and keep 
them from going blind. Some day.... 

We climb back into our car. It plows on through 
the sand. But soon the driving is a little easier. Trees 
appear. Weare nearing the Jordan. Here, under these 
now dusty willows, flows the crooked little river with a 
faint murmur among the reeds, with a soft plash about 
the keel of a single boat. Here where the water is 
shallow in the rainless season, Joshua and the children 

[141 ] 


ISRAEL 


of Israel are said to have forded the stream. A Greek 
hunter and watchman lives on this spot in a little com- 
pound. A fierce-looking, mustachioed man who rows 
tourists across from shore to shore. It matters little 
whether this is the exact spot where Israel forded the 
river. If the Old Testament stories are legends, the 
legends were invented with a punctilious regard for the 
topography of the land. From here the road leads 
straight to Jericho. Nebo towers in the distance. Israel 
marched from well to well until it came to the walls 
of the'city, ... 3 

The car follows that line of march. The modern town 
of Jericho is little more than a large Arab village in 
an oasis. An effendi has built himself a house m a 
beautiful walled garden. Above the walls tower the 
cypresses, the recently imported banana-trees. In the 
shops of the village streets the small, dark, very sweet 
bananas are for sale. On the edge of the village lies 
the spring which made the ancient city and the modern 
village possible. West of the spring lie the ruins of the 
city that Joshua took. Perhaps the spring was within 
the walls. Here, as everywhere in Palestine, one gropes 
amid suppositions. Fantastically perched on a ledge 
half-way up the nearest mountain is a huge Russian 
monastery. The money that came into the land was 
spent on incantations. It is for us, some day, to dig 
below the ruins of Jericho and recover the record of 
this phase of the history of mankind. We must dig 
too into those knolls that stretch along the road. It is 
unbelievable that nature formed them thus or hewed 
them thus. Are they mounds, mounds of the pre- 
Israelitish Semites or of inhabitants still more remote? 

[ 142 ] 





LAND OF ISRAEL 


Did the Anakim build them or that strange race sym- 
bolized as sons of God descending unto the daughters 
of men? . . . Nothing is impossible here, nothing in- 
credible. .. . The mountains begin again. Here is the 
road up to Jerusalem.... 

Going south from Jerusalem the land is less formi- 
dable, less rugged. Here, indeed, it once bloomed like 
a garden. The desert had been conquered here, as it 
shall be conquered again. It was faring along this road 
to Bethlehem that Rachel, having borne Benjamin, died 
and Jacob erected a pillar over her grave. The tomb 
of Rachel that stands beside the road today has a 
Moorish arch and cupola. But that the spot has been 
uninterruptedly commemorated through ages during 
many of which no Jewish foot dared tread these paths, 
illustrates once more the tenacity with which our spirit, 
if not the body of our people, has possessed the land. 

A khan appears along the road—an open enclosure of 
crumbling masonry. Here the caravans and their driv- 
ers stop for rest. There is no tree. Arabs crouch in 
the sun. Camels stand by the wall. Somewhere there 
must be a little brackish water. Once water refreshed 
the earth here. For not far from the khan appear the 
pools of Solomon. The king had gardens here, gardens 
of palms and fig-trees and pomegranates. And in the 
garden he had built three large artificial pools. Small 
lakes with marble steps leading down into the water. 
You can see the dusk and the heavy stars drooping over 
the hills, and the queen who was the daughter of Pharaoh 
descending the steps to bathe. ... The momentary 
vision fades. In the great sunlight you see workmen 
in one of the pools. They are Jewish workmen repair- 

[ 143 ] 


ISRAEL 


ing the walls of the pool, whence water is to be led to 
refresh Jerusalem.... 

The road winds into Bethlehem. Here David fed his 
father’s sheep. ‘Today Bethlehem is a small Christian- 
Arab city; narrow, crooked, crowded streets, children 
and boys crying for baksheesh, men and women busy 
manufacturing amulets and rosaries and _ souvenirs. 
Hardly a tree. The sun smites down on the shadowless 
streets. The town lives by the Church of the Nativity. 
The Church is supported by pillars that were ancient 
when the Crusaders came and left their crosses carved on 
the capitals. An astonishing Byzantine altar with By- 
zantine saints on a gold background, with silver relief 
work. Down dim stairs you are guided into a cavern 
where the stable of the Nativity stands. But you cannot 
see wall or manger. Lamps and images and jejune 
ornaments bedizen the place. A prophet born in a 
manger. How that falls in with this austere land of 
Israel. The trappings of the Greek Church strike a 
false and trivial note... . 

Hebron, where this road ends, is a city of another 
kind. It is an Arab city. The Jewish community is 
not yet large. And the Arabs are fanatical and hostile. 
It, too, is treeless and sun-baked and stony. But gaunt 
corners of houses projecting into the streets and window- 
less walls and something severe and massive seems to 
keep true the character of this city whose antiquity stag- 
gers the mind. For here Abraham dwelt by the oaks 
of Mamre. One great oak, an oak of enormous girth, 
its brittle old branches supported by staves, stands in 
an iron enclosure and is shown as the tree under which 
he raised an altar to God. And here, too, in this city, 

[ 144 | 


LAND OF ISRAEL 


is the cave of Machpelah where Abraham and Sara, 
Jacob and Leah lie entombed. A huge, formless mosque 
has been built over the tomb of the patriarchs. A long 
flight of very ancient stone stairs leads upward. Dark, 
barefoot Arabs guard the stairs. No Jew must go be- 
yond the seventh step. The Arabs are in earnest. There 
is a fanatical gleam in their eyes. They point to a 
jagged hole in the ancient masonry. You may put 
your hand in and make a wish. You may, elsewhere 
in this gray and crumbling pile, look through something 
resembling a keyhole into a rude vault that is said to 
hold the tomb of Esau. For the privileges of the sev- 
enth step and the keyhole a fee is demanded. ‘The graves 
of our patriarchs we may not see. The mufti is ob- 
durate. Even the pleading of the American consulate 
no longer avails. . . . Here, as in the case of the Temple 
site, we are serene. The dark men who guard the stairs 
in Hebron attribute to us their own ways of thought. 
Some day they will learn that, though we are not with- 
out a proper reverence for the monuments of antiquity, 
we are beyond the age of miracle and magic. We do 
not buy absolution with olive leaves from a garden; we 
do not seek healing from the touch of a tomb. Work 
and justice must bring us the first; drainage and the 
Hadassah Medical service the second. Since we are 
dedicated by our history and character to a complete 
abstention from the exercise of force and the exertion 
of power, the continued Christian or Mohammedan pos- 
session of the memoried places of the land is a not 
unwelcome symbol of our national mood and our na- 
tional aspirations.... 

Hebron, in spite of all, is ours. Ours the earth and 

[ 145 ] 


ISRAEL 


the memories. Hither the spies of Joshua came, hither 
to Kiriath Avba, city of one of the kings of Anak. 
Here grew those clusters of the grape. Here, where the 
desert creeps in now, we shall cause the grapes to grow 
again. Joshua assigned the city as a city of refuge 
to be held by the priests, the children of Aaron. All our 
cities shall be cities of refuge from the peacelessness 
of the world hereafter. Yet the city will remember 
that David’s children were born here, that from here 
David first ruled the kingdom, that later Absalom called 
himself king in Hebron. Poetic and tragic memories 
gather here. .. . Today the desert sand sifts in. Street- 
vendors crouch in the sand. Blind beggars abound and 
children with the terrible beginnings of trachoma. The 
black-swathed Arab women bear burdens while their 
lords precede them, lolling on asses. But already a few 
tree-tops wave here and there—the trees that are in this 
land the symbol of the Jew. ... 


IV 


Jericho lies, hot and blazing, far below the level of . 
the sea. Hebron lies in the hills and cool winds sweep 
through the town. The nights are full of freshness 
here as in Jerusalem and the dewfall is heavy. But 
these cities are on the edge of the desert. North of 
Jerusalem the desert is at an end. In northern Judea, 
in the two Galilees the true character of the land is | 
revealed. ‘This is Palestine. . 

A country of hills. Even the narrow strip of level 
coastland is broken by the glory of Carmel. Between 
the coast and the valley of the Jordan the plains are 

[ 146 | 


LAND OF ISRAEL 


few. Whether it is the hill-country of Ephraim where 
the massive cone of Tabor towers, or Judza or Galilee 
in the north. The long, soft slopes of the hills are 
everywhere—the mauve, brown, tawny or golden hills. 
Except in the valley of Jezreel the roads are all moun- 
tain roads that curve and sweep in and out among the 
hills in circles, in loops, in beautiful, intricate patterns. 
The roads sweep along the sheer edges of the moun- 
tains; you look down and your heart leaps into your 
mouth. Stone bridges span abysses and the courses 
of water. The roads sweep on... . 

In Judea the hills were all terraced once and olive 
groves climbed to their very peaks. The softer, longer 
slopes of Galilee needed no terracing. But all the hill- 
sides of Palestine were forested or cultivated once and 
it takes no very powerful imagination to see this land 
as it will be if our work goes on—a green and irrigated 
land, a land of parks and pools, a land of mountain 
gardens and of hillside-fields, of blossoms of the almond 
and the orange everywhere, vineyards on all the south- 
ern slopes and of palm groves to the rim of the desert. 
For it is a mistake that the country is without water. 
The rain is seasonal but sufficient once proper means 
of preserving and distributing the water are found. 
The great reservoir of Lake Kinnereth, the smaller 
water of Merom, the Jordan rising in Northern moun- 
tains and flowing downward through the valley—these 
sources of irrigation have scarcely been touched. Nor 
must the two brooks farther west be forgotten nor 
the springs, like the famous spring of Harod, nor the 
possibility of digging artesian wells, nor the remark- 
able feat accomplished, for instance, by the people of 

[ 147 ] 


ISRAEL 


Nahalal. They drained the swamps; completely 
stamped out malaria in three years; gathered the drained 
water into reservoirs which irrigate thousands of dunams 
and thus quite literally turned a poisonous desert into 
a garden. 

Today the hills are still tan and red and yellow. 
Conquest after conquest, centuries of misrule, of neg- 
lect and sloth have done their worst. The forests were 
cut down or uprooted; no water was preserved; the 
rains carried the soil into the sea. Many of the hills 
are naked rock—majestic but barren. Yet ruined as 
the land is and hard to reclaim, there are everywhere 
spots that support one’s vision of the future. You 
drive from Tiberias to Safed. There is no more fan- 
tastic road in the world. Out of the glow of that 
tropical valley the car climbs up into the hills once 
more. ‘The radiant surface of the lake below is lost 
and seen again a dozen times. It disappears behind 
mountains; it shines again between the heights; it seems 
to follow and yet is lost. Here are thousands of acres 
of deserted land. It is no man’s land today. Not 
even wandering Bedouins come into these northern 
wastes. There is scarcely a village. There is no tree. 
High on the western shore of the lake is perched an 
Italian monastery. It, too, is deserted. The shutters | 
are closed. The hill-winds sweep through the arcades 
of the beautiful top story. No one wants this land. 
The Arabs have let it lie barren through the centuries. 
Today it is technically government land. Why is it not 
given to men like the men of Nahalal? . .. The car 
still climbs upward through the naked hills. Suddenly 
a point of green appears. It grows into a patch, into 

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LAND OF ISRAEL 


acres; it lifts the heart as only in a desolate land trees 
and water can lift it. On a saddle of the hills, miles 
from their fields of grain, their almond groves and their 
vineyards the people of Rosh-Pinah have planted a lit- 
tle forest of the eucalyptus. The long, drooping 
branches wave in the wind; the waste is no longer a 
waste. The eucalyptus which the Arabs call the Jew- 
ish tree is here. The future is here, the forest coolness 
of days to come. ... The hills in Juda and lower 
Galilee are not so high. Here the country is more 
thickly settled and shows its most characteristic ap- 
pearance. Here the roads are more level and one can 
loiter to look upon the land. ... A village of Arab 
fellaheen, or peasants. 'The huts are grayish-white, built 
of mud and mortar. They are small, irregular cubes, 
more like tombs than houses. They huddle together or 
are connected by crumbling walls, so that the village 
straggles up the hillside in a compact, irregular, in- 
extricable mass. Windows are few. The door-holes 
are dark and cavernous. Some of the flat roofs are 
of mud, some thatched with rotting straw. There is 
no tree. By the walls men sit in the sun crosslegged. 
. A few children play feebly. A woman is grinding corn 
between two stones. An ass nibbles a dry wayside 
shrub. . . . Beyond the village, at the foot of the hill, 
stretch a few ragged fields. A man is plowing. He 
has a bullock hitched to a wooden plow. The grind- 
ing of the corn, the plowing of the field have not 
changed in a hundred generations. . . . Still farther 
on, if the village is lucky, there is a grove of small 
orange trees. Near the orange-grove is the well 
used for irrigation and a tired, dispirited camel walks 
[ 149 | 


ISRAEL 


round and round and round turning the handle of 
the primitive irrigation pump... . If the village is 
large there is a mosque with a tiny cupola somewhere 
in the coil of huts and a minaret rises from it which 
is rude in the sun but will be beautiful at dusk when 
the hills turn purple and the sky rose and the heavy 
stars appear... . 

The village is listless. The squatters in the sun 
hardly move. People along the road are unaware of 
time. A man, sitting sidewise on an ass, trots at a 
snail’s pace. It will take him a long, hot day to ride 
from Nazareth to Nablus. ... iAnother on his ass 
leads a camel on which are all his household goods: 
a few sacks, a few earthenware jars, a few bits of 
brass. His wife trudges behind the camel in the deep 
sand. . . . Suddenly there is a rattling. A wagon full 
of grain or fruit drawn by two vigorous mules. A youth- 
ful driver with a face full of intelligence and energy. 
In the back of the wagon two others: bare arms and 
throats, taut muscles, sunbrowned by labor in the open 
fields despite near-sighted eyes and the foreheads of 
thinkers. Chaluzim. These are our people... . 

The road turns and the Arab village disappears. 
Across well-cultivated fields appear the barracks and 
houses of a Jewish colony. The houses are roofed with | 
orange tiles, and these orange tiles will soon be as char- 
acteristic of the land as the cube-like Arab huts. Trees 
appear: the inevitable eucalyptus that drains swamps, 
but also the broad-leaved figtree, the almond and olive, 
the peach tree and the palm. Beyond the fields lies 
an orange-grove and from afar comes the inimitable 


melancholy sound—half cry, half wail—of the mechani-| 
[ 150 ] 


LAND OF ISRAEL 


eal irrigation pump. In the immediate foreground 
olive trees border the field. A group of pickers is at 
work: vigorous girls in neat white head-kerchiefs, youths 
in open blouses. The car stops. Shalom! They smile 
and give us handfuls of olives. ‘They are bringing to 
the land, they are bringing to themselves life and 
Peace aids 

The road goes on. Barren places again. At long 
intervals the single palm and well that mark a saint’s 
or nebi’s tomb. Here and there not too far from the 
road black tents woven of goat’s wool—tents of the 
Bedouins. .. . A caravan of camels, a motor-car once 
in a long while; an Arab effendi on a horse. Under 
his biretta of crimson velvet his eyes are severe. . 
Arab villages. . . . Stretches of desert hill and narrow 
valley. . . . Suddenly woods and water and green fields 
and the orange-colored roofs of Jewish houses and the 
plaintive cry of the pumps. . . . Huge cactus, slender 
date-palm, mysterious cypresses behind a crumbling 
wall... The murmur of water in orange-groves. 
. . . Olives on a few hillsides and again the naked hills. 
... The ocean of light, shadowless light by day; the 
large and liquid stars by night... . Palestine... . 

The road winds into cities, the cities of the West 
and North: Jaffa with Tel-Aviv, of which I shall speak 
later; Haifa which lies at the foot of Carmel; Tiberias 
and Safed which became in late exilic times the seats 
of scholars and mystics and were accounted holy cities. 

Jaffa, bright, busy, rattling, half-Europeanized, lies 
by the harbor that is, unluckily, guarded and made dif- 
ficult of access by the fabled rocks of Andromeda. Arab 


cafés and shops full of brass utensils line the streets. 
[151] 


ISRAEL 


The barefoot burden-bearers, mighty men who can 
shoulder huge packing-cases and pianos, swarm about 
with their flat feet and padded backs. Ramshackle 
carriages rattle over the stones. Here is the immi- 
gration station at which the greater part of the three 
thousand Jewish immigrants a month arrives. This is 
the gate of the land. From here road and train go 
to the colonies and settlements, to Jerusalem in the 
south, to Haifa in the north... . 

An exact semi-circle of hills, rising to the “excel- 
lency of Carmel,” holds in its arms the beautiful harbor 
of Haifa. Carmel rises at the southern edge and on 
the narrow plain at its foot the city is built. Across 
the bay at the north lies Acre, once made famous by 
the Crusaders, now a dwindling Arab town. The hills 
about the bay are blue and golden; when the light 
fades they turn first amethyst, then mauve. The bay 
has the iridescence of all Southern waters. Beyond 
its deep and broad expanse the Mediterranean rolls 
with a muffled roar. The scene has amplitude and gran- 
deur. But it is not formidable. It is clothed in soft- 
ness as with a cosmic garment of gold. 

Winding, white-walled roads gradually ascend the 
mountain to which Elijah gathered the tribes of Israel 
to make their choice between Jehovah and the gods 
of the strangers. From every point on these roads 
the harbor and the town are visible. At night the in- 
numerable lights of the town are magical through vel- 
vet darkness under the rich, white stars. But it is per- 
haps morning that is loveliest from the top of Carmel. 


The freshness of air and water is exquisite; the light 
[152] 


LAND OF ISRAEL 


glows without burning; the green and blue and gold 
of the scene are still delicate and restrained. A wind 
from the sea rustles in the fragrant pines and the tops 
of the cypresses sway with a grave and gentle motion. 
From afar floats the trampling of long breakers on 
the beaches. There is just enough sound to make the 
silence audible. Mountain, city and bay melt into the 
eye which, having seen this spot, cannot but remember 
it forever. . . . “Thy head upon thee is like Carmel,” 
the poet of the Song of Songs said of the prince’s daugh- 
ter. Carmel is still the symbol of ultimate beauty 
in the land of Israel. And people are gathering there 
to study and to live. A college of liberal arts should 
soon join the admirable technological institute in Haifa. 
The orange-colored roofs of our new suburbs and set- 
tlements increase in number daily. 

From Haifa to Tiberias on the shore of Lake Kin- 
nereth one travels, as one does from Jerusalem to 
Jericho, eastward and from high mountains into deep 
valleys. So deep is the Jordan Valley that stretches 
from Kinnereth to the Dead Sea, that one changes 
from a temperate mountain climate to a sub-tropical 
one. Snow lies on Hermon, beyond the Syrian border; 
the winds of the sea are cool over Carmel; Tiberias 
glows in an eternal Summer. The city was built to 
be the capital of the Tetrarchate of Galilee. But little 
can be seen today that recalls the Hellenistic period. 
A ruined Arab fortress fronts the lake. Conventional 
Arab townhouses with thick walls and airy arches stand 
on crooked streets. Since over sixty per cent of the 


population is Jewish there are many European houses 
[153 ] 


ISRAEL 


and many trees. From the verandas of the houses 
one sees the blue lake with its vigorous surf and the 
misty mountains to the north and west. From very 
ancient times Tiberias has been a Jewish city. It be- 
came the center of spiritual authority after the destruc- 
tion of the Temple; the Mishna and Jerusalem Talmud 
were completed here. In later ages men of great name 
came to the city. North of it lie buried Maimonides 
and Rabbi Akiba. On the shore of the lake, near an 
immemorial synagogue is the grave of Rabbi Meir baal 
Ness. To this house of study men still repair. A 
group of Polish Jews in black caftans and long ear- 
locks may be seen loitering upon the yellow sand by 
the lake. A little beyond the old house of study, shut 
in by rude structures of masonry, are the famous hot 
springs. Jews and Arabs use the baths. The water 
flows into the lake; you may plunge a hand into the 
hot and healing stream. In Autumn the air still burns 
a little. But the winter climate is like that of Florida 
or the Riviera. The pines and mountain roads and 
bathing beaches of Haifa, the palms and hot springs 
and lake shore of Tiberias—these form no small part 
of the potential wealth of Palestine. There are no 
lovelier or healthier winter resorts in the world. The 
Arabs let them lie lonely and barren. A new period 
begins. ...... 

By that fantastic road through the mountains along 
the lake one reaches Safed, the northmost city of the 
land. One of the highest, too. It is built on a hill 
that rises thirty-five hundred feet above the sea. ‘The 


houses straggle up and down the hillside. Cool winds 
[ 154 | 


oa 


LAND OF ISRAEL 


blow. Arab and Jew mingle in the sun-drenched 
streets. Safed, too, is a sacred city. Again and again 
in the course of time the Jewish community rose to 
fame. In the sixteenth century Rabbi Isaac Luria 
lived here and the mystic teachings of the Kabbala 
went forth from this hill. The Jews here are still pious. 
In a newly built house, the house of a man who spoke 
Russian and German and English, I met for the first 
time a Russian ger, one of those many thousands of 
Russian peasants who, far from the pale of residence, 
from Jewish teaching or example, came in their strange 
primitive way to the conclusion that Jesus had not 
abrogated the law of his fathers. Therefore these 
peasants traveled far and sought out rabbis and after 
seven years of the most rigid testing underwent cir- 
cumcision and with their wives and children entered 
the House of Israel. Some of them came to Palestine. 
Their prayerbooks are in Russian. They are poor 
now. But every hand stretched out to them is a help- 
ing hand. They are gerim, sojourners. The command 
to treat the sojourner even as the home-born is kept. ... 

From Safed we drove back to Haifa and saw once 
more that incomparable scene and watched the morn- 
ing there once more. Through Nazareth we drove, by 
Miriam’s well, through the valley of Jezreel where the 
new life is strong and hopeful, through the Arab city 
of Jenin, through Nablus which is the Shechem of 
old days, back under a clear sickle moon and the 
scarcely imaginable stars to Jerusalem. . . . We had 
seen the desert cities and the Dead Sea; we had seen 


the trees of Metulla, farthest north of our colonies, 
[ 155 | 


ISRAEL 


from the hill-top of Safed. ... A small land and a poor 
land. Yet not so poor but that it can harbor a few mil- 
lions of our people; not so small or so poor but that, 
as in ancient days, it can give birth to ideas that man- 
kind will not willingly let die. ... 


[ 156} 


CHAPTER V, 
EARTH AND FOLK 


I 


THE notion of reclaiming and resettling Palestine 
is not new. Neither is the notion that to conquer 
Galuth, the dispersion, not only as an outer but as an 
inner fact, it is necessary for the Jew to regain con- 
tact with the earth. All through the ages there have 
been periodic returns and resettlements. But these 
were mainly religious in motive and character. What 
differentiates the various movements of the last forty- 
five years from all others is the growing conviction 
that, in the various alien and often hostile civilizations 
in which the Jew has dwelt, there has been a loss of 
both human dignity and national creative power. To 
regain these—thus the argument runs—it is necessary 
to normalize the situation of the Jewish people: to 
establish a peasantry on the soil of Eretz Israel, to 
create for the Jew that blending of native land and 
native speech which is the mark of other national cul- 
tures, to liberate him thus from the constant and un- 
ending friction that, at best, belongs to the life of every 
minority group. 

I shall not enter into an analysis or criticism of this 
argument yet. Its force must be clear to every reflec- 
tive mind. Its weakness lies, aside from insuperable 
practical obstacles, in its insistence upon the normali- 

[ 157 | 


ISRAEL 


zation of the position of the Jewish people. But if 
the facts of human experience have any meaning it is 
clear from the history of Israel during the period from 
the Babylonian captivity to the present day that it is, 
in no figurative sense, a peculiar people, that its posi- 
tion is, in point of fact, unique and that its function- 
ing upon the scene of human history is inseparable 
from that uniqueness. Yet I am as anxious for the 
_upbuilding of Palestine as any radical Zionist. For 
about that upbuilding, about that ideal and that task, 
have been gathered the most positive forces that Jewry 
has known for generations. The task and the ideal 
have vivified the national and cultural consciousness 
of the scattered tribes. Through them negation of 
oneself becomes affirmation, fear is exchanged for loy- 
alty, cringing for a just pride, forgetfulness for self- 
recollection. Palestine has healed thousands of souls, 
it has spread the sense of national and human dignity 
to the remotest regions of the dispersion; it has given 
us recognition as a people and a place in the councils 
of the nations. It is self-recovery; it is salvation. ‘The 
upbuilding of the land is the historic task of the Jew- 
ish people of this age. If we fail we fail the world, 
we fail ourselves; we lapse back into a moral helotage 
unknown since the darkest periods of our history. We 
dare not and we cannot fail... . 

The earliest modern colonists, largely financed by 
Edmond de Rothschild and the Jewish Colonization 
Association established by Baron Hirsch, came from 
those Russian circles of the “Friends of Zion’ who, 
after the massacres of 1879 to 1882 despaired of Eu- 
rope, despaired of the palliatives of protest and charity 

[ 158 ] 


EARTH AND: FOLK 


and, under the leadership of Leo Pinsker, revived the 
ancient Jewish doctrine of auto-emancipation. Many 
years were to pass before Theodor Herzl was to issue 
his now historical call for complete national self-recol- 
lection: to gather the first Jewish Congress at Basel 
(1897) and to found the Zionist Organization which 
first unofficially but today by international agreements 
is the sole spokesman and representative of the Jewish 
people. The early colonists were isolated and forlorn 
groups. They fought the desolate soil, swamp and 
fever, the tyranny and chicanery of the Turk. No 
wonder that the life of the settlements was precarious, 
that it often seemed doubtful whether they could en- 
dure. There had been, furthermore, no special prep- 
aration of the people for the land; there was not even 
an experimental basis in economic or agricultural 
theory. Yet the settlements did endure; they repre- 
sented a foothold in Palestine. Their moral value was 
inestimable. They are almost venerable places today: 
the magnificent agricultural school and settlement of 
the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Mikveh Israel, a 
place of dusky groves and avenues of trees, broad fields, 
rich vineyards; Rosh-Pinah near the sacred city of 
Safed; the famous colonies that cluster on the coast- 
land north and south of Jaffa—Petach-Tikvah, Rishon- 
le-Zion, Nes-Ziona and Rehoboth. 

These colonies were all founded on the basis of 
private ownership and the buying of labor in the open 
market of the land. Associations, like that of the 
winegrowers, were of course formed. Nevertheless, 
the struggle of the individual farmer was severe. Nor 
was this all. The employment of Arab labor threat- 

[ 159 ] 


ISRAEL 


ened to recreate a certain phase of Galuth represented 
by the Jewish employer and the non-Jewish worker. 
Thus the cry of exploiter and exploited might easily, 
however unjustly, have been raised. Successful ef- 
forts have been made in recent years to mend these 
conditions. On National Fund lands the Keren Haye- 
sod has established settlements of Yemenite Jews at 
Rishon-le-Zion, Rehoboth and Petach-Tikvah. In ad- 
dition, Chaluzim have been settled on neighboring lands 
who can undertake the seasonal work on the old farms 
and plant trees and cultivate fields and raise poultry 
and cattle of their own. The old habit of employing 
Arab labor has not been wholly abandoned. The fel- 
lah is cheap; and since he comes from a neighboring 
village of his own, the employer has no responsibility 
toward him beyond the prompt payment of the daily 
wage. But with the increased immigration of agri- 
culturally trained Jewish workers this evil, a very real 
one, tends to disappear. 

Petach-Tikvah, Gate of Hope, is the oldest and 
largest of the early colonies. Over four thousand peo- 
ple live here in the long well-shaded village streets. 
Old eucalyptus forests with their white stems and wil- 
lowy, drooping branches give health and coolness. ‘The 
little Yakon River furnishes water for the many orange- 
groves. ‘The low stone houses along the streets still 
have something of that air of the Galician exile which — 
clings to these old settlements. But beyond the streets 
are pleasanter houses with airy verandas from which 
one sees the ruins of Antipatris and the long line of 
the Judean hills. Here one can walk through a long 
avenue of cypresses into a garden and drink tea with 

[ 160 ] 


EARTH AND FOLK 


one’s host beside a fountain. Here are palms and 
flowers and from the roof of the spacious house behind, 
the doves flutter through the mild air. The orange- 
grove borders the garden and one hears the cry of 
the pump and the gurgle of water in the irrigation 
trenches. Behind the house are neat stables for the 
cattle and in the barn one’s host shows the fruit of his 
first tobacco harvest. He has been here for forty 
years. He was here in those early days when the 
colonists lived in a hill-village. For where these groves 
and fields and gardens are were swamps poisonous with 
malaria. He is gnarled and hardy. A Jewish pioneer 
who has fought the wilderness and won the fight. A 
profound satisfaction breathes from him. Will Eng- 
land keep her moral engagements in Palestine? He 
waves the question aside. It is, thank God, no longer 
the Turk. “He is pioneer, farmer, thinker, too. He 
speaks Russian and German and, of course, Hebrew. 
He has been through much—through the Turkish con- 
scription of his sons, through the Arab attack of 1921. 
An intrepid and yet quiet spirit. He has literally turned 
the wilderness into a garden; he has reclaimed a por- 
tion of Eretz Israel and set an example to the gen- 
erations to come. Now he tells us has come the age 
of a Jewish and a quiet life in the old land. A Jew. 
He has conquered his piece of earth, but he does not 
dream of power or force. He dreams of the creative 
activities of the Jewish spirit for his posterity, for his 
people, for mankind... . 

The other old colonies stretch south and east of 
Jaffa. Most famous of them is Rishon-le-Zion with 


its great wine-cellars built by Rothschild—huge caves 
[ 161 ] 


ISRAEL 


under the earth in which the wine ripens in endless 
rows of casks. Some of the great casks hold thirty 
to forty thousand liters. The aroma of the wine rises 
pleasantly into the head and, coming from the cellars, 
the trees and houses lie mellow in the golden atmos- 
phere. In spite of impoverishment in Europe and pro- 
hibition in America, the wine-growers are recovering 
from the ruinous depression of the war. The acute 
French manager is very sure of the future of both the 
land and its wines. “The independence of Egypt, the 
French power in Syria: the collapse of Russia, the 
American exclusion of immigrants—these things are 
bringing the Meshiach. . , .” 

The road to Rehoboth is sandy before the winter rains 
and must be traveled by mule-cart. It is still cool in 
the woods of Rishon-le-Zion; it is pleasant to see the 
neat little houses of the Yemenites, their special syna- 
gogue, the dark small slender graceful people who, cut 
off from the rest of Jewry for ages, have brought hither 
their piety, their industry, their ancient and beautiful 
craftsmanship. Beyond their quarter the Palestinian 
road begins. At this season to drive here is like plow- 
ing through dunes. Our driver, a tall spare native 
Palestinian, urges his mule on in Hebrew and Arabic. 
The colony is left behind and, even in this fertile region, 
something like desert land begins. One meets desert 
people. Bedouins grave and graceful on their sway- 
ing camels ride by. The rich saddles and many-colored 
hangings of the camels are brilliant in the sunlight. 
They pass. From among the low sand-hills on the 
right emerges quite suddenly a little group of Bedouin 
women on foot. They are not veiled like the women 

[ 162 | 


~ 


EARTH AND FOLK 


of the fellaheen. Their faces are tattooed; over fore- 
head and nose they wear hangings of silverwork and 
old coins and one or two of them have golden nose- 
rings. They are small and quick and soft in their 
movements like the lizards that scurry across the road. 
Their long black pitifully filthy robes trail in the heavy 
sand and one can see, now and then, the motion of 
their small brown feet. At a bend of the road they 
vanish. But soon the dunes on one side of the road 
disappear and a desert field stretches to the low hills 
beyond. In the middle of the field are black tents— 
the square tents of the Bedouins. We clamber from 
our cart and walk over to the tents. A small woman 
kneels in the sand. She is weaving the black tent- 
cloth of goat’s wool on a loom that is merely a little 
frame in the sand. Behind her another is pounding 
grain between two stones. The women arise and others 
come out of the tents. A few children, too. The 
Bedouins are friendly near the colonies. There is so 
much chance to steal. The tattooed faces of the women 
have a shy, dusky comeliness. Their wrists and hands 
are tiny. Their black eyes shine. We look into the 
tents. A few bags for sleeping. A broken piece of 


._shoddy European furniture. We cannot go into the 


tents for fear of vermin. But there are craftsmen in the 
desert. The women wear charming things. Through 
our driver who speaks Arabic and pats the little women 
on their ring-like turbans we chaffer with them. I buy 
some old, beautifully wrought silver, a few primitive 
rings, a bracelet, a chain woven of cloves and pieces 
of old amber. I ask one of the women whether the 
child beside her is her own. She shakes her head and 
[ 163 ] 


ISRAEL 


smiles sadly. “I had one. It died. I have no other. 
I think God is not at peace with me.” 

We drive on through the heavy, burning sand. Sud- 
denly shadows fall across the path—shadows in this 
weary land. ‘The Jewish tree? Yes, it is a eucalyptus 
grove. The desert is a desert no more. From the 
trees comes a group of Chaluzim. Young men stripped 
to the waist. Newcomers who want to get sun-tanned 
and, so, sun-hardened as soon as may be. Roadworkers. 
Next season this will be no desert-road but a well- 
kept chaussée, and motor-cars will spin up and down 
it. The Chaluzim wave to us. Shalom! Morning and 
evening and through the bitter burning of the noon- 
time, through want and inconceivable hardship— 
Shalom! Work, hope, peace... . 

The eucalyptus disappears and tall bushes of the 
mimosa line the sandy road. ‘The mimosas are in bloom. 
Innumerable little tufts of gold hang on the bushes 
and fall into the deep sand. Then we see palms and 
tall oaks and an archway of stone. Nes Ziona! 

We drive through the archway. The irrigation pump 
is beside it. We see a high reservoir of masonry. On 
its edge stands a youth—stripped, cast in bronze. One 
moment he stands poised. He plunges into the cool 
water of the reservoir. ... The plash of water, the 
murmur of running water, the rustling of trees in the 
wind. .. . You do not know what these things are 
until you come to a desert country, a land that has 
been permitted to lapse back into the ever-hungry 
desert. . . . For hours we had been on that road, our 
wheels in the sand often to the axles. ‘The sun had 
beaten down on us and the unsparing light whipped 

[ 164 ] 


EARTH AND FOLK 


our eyes. The mule was covered with foam and its 
eyes had a hurt, strained look in them. . . . And then 
the shade of trees and the coolness of water in Nes 
Ziona. ... We walked into the orange-grove. An 
old man stood among the trees leading the water, the 
fresh, running spring water from one ditch to another. 
The trees were full of fruit, still deep green but ripe. 
Our Palestinian driver assured us that they were best 
before they turned yellow. We plucked them from 
the trees and ate them and listened to the heavenly 
rustle of the trees, to the plash and murmur of water.... 

Beyond the groves and fields of Nes Ziona we drove 
on to Rehoboth, a large and pleasant village with houses 
in gardens, with its synagogue on a hill to the north, 
with trees of the pine, the olive, the cypress and the 
almond. Here, too, as in most of the old colonies the 
Keren Hayesod has added Yemenite workers and 
pioneers from the West. Here, too, the long years of 
struggle are coming to an end and you feel in the air 
a country peace of vine and fig-tree and of men and 
women resting against their mother earth... . 

The history of the old individualistic colonies is one 
of mistakes, of heroic suffering, heroic endurance, often 
heroic failure. The new Zionist methods and resettle- 
ments, the new scientific agriculture are at last mak- 
ing them steadily safe and profitable. Yet the service 
of those old colonies, even in their hardest days, was 
an inestimable one. ‘They proved that this ruined and 
desert land could be made to blossom; they showed that 
it could be made to blossom through the labor of Jews. 
They furnished the fundamental proof of the possi- 


bility of the upbuilding of Palestine. ‘Their sufferings 
[ 165 } 


ISRAEL 


and their labors helped, at a crucial hour of history, 
to win from the nations our right in the homeland of 
our race. 


II 


The differences between the old and the new colonies 
are differences in origin and economic structure. All 
other differences arise from these two. ‘The old colo- 
nies depended on individual philanthropists; the new 
depend on the concerted efforts of the Jewish people 
in all parts of the world. In 1901, the Keren Kayemeth 
Leyisrael was founded, the Jewish National Fund for 
the purchase of land in Palestine. The land purchased 
by it is the inalienable possession of the Jewish people. 
Parcels are assigned to colonies or colonists as lease- 
holds personal or hereditary. But even as Leviticus 
declares that the land shall not be sold in perpetuity, 
since it is God’s, so the Palestinian land acquired by 
the Jewish National Fund cannot be alienated, since 
it is the nation’s. A second fund for the upbuilding 
of the land, the now famous Keren Hayesod, was 
founded in 1920. It provides the means for the Pal- 
estinian budget, both economic and cultural. It founds 
colonies, trains colonists, supports the educational sys- 
tem, reforests barren lands and drains swamps, co- 
operates with the Hadassah medical service—in brief, 
carries out all the cultural and economic tasks of the 
governmental agency of a colonizing nation. 

It is strictly speaking impossible to overestimate the 
moral effect both on the new colonies and on the Jews 
in Galuth of these two funds or organizations. The 
Chaluz or pioneer in the poorest or newest settlement, 

[ 166 ] 


BA Ray AND: OE 


housed worse than his cattle, living on hard and in- 
sufficient fare, laboring in the unaccustomed heat of a 
semi-tropical climate, feels that he is supported and 
sustained by his fellow-Jews in almost every habitable 
land of the earth, that he is symbol, emissary, ful- 
fillment of hope and yearning to thousands upon 
thousands of his scattered race. The moral effects 
of the activity of the two funds upon its participants 
have been equally notable and will be fully discussed 
further on. What must be abundantly clear at once 
is that the new colonies, as conscious and codperative 
experiments of a great though scattered group of people 
welded together by the fire of an idea, are founded on 
the basis of new assumptions, new methods, new aims. 

The difficulties endured by the older colonies were 
closely studied. It was found that the conquest of 
this land, the sale of its products in the markets of 
the world, the cultural institutions necessary for a Jew- 
ish communal life, could not be sustained by the acci- 
dental codperations withm an individualistic society. 
For here was no finished social structure into which 
people could filter and find their place. And, indeed, 
the existence of such a structure would have repro- 
duced the conditions of Galuth. The ruin and deso- 
lateness of the land was and is to us its glory and its 
opportunity. Here the creative effort of the Jew must 
build first the very soil he is to dig, bring the very 
water that is to make it tillable, fight the diseases of 
man and beast and plant which to the natives had been 
mere objects of superstitious fear. Here stones had 
to be broken and roads to be built and sand dunes 
turned into forests. A whole generation of individual 

[ 167 ] 


ISRAEL 


pioneers might have perished of malaria. Only co- 
operative groups could hope to survive and succeed. 
And this necessity fortunately fell in not only with 
the modern but with the immemorial Jewish dream of 
social justice and economic peace. To the descendants 
of those ancients who demanded the release from bond- 
age, the return of every man to his own and the for- 
giveness of debts in Sabbatical years and years of 
Jubilee, as they had instinctively founded and led all 
modern movements toward the socialization of man’s 
economic life, it seemed but natural that in the land 
of Israel codperation and not competition should be 
at the basis of the social structure. Practical necessities 
and ideological tendencies coincided. From this coinci- 
dence the new colonies arose. 

The new colonies are, broadly speaking, of two types: 
the Kvuzah or purely cooperative group and Moshav 
Ovdim (Settlement of Workers) or group of codpera- 
tive leaseholders. ‘There are minor distinctions. Per- 
haps the most important both economically and cul- 
turally is that between the small and restricted and the 
large and unrestricted Kvuzah. And for seekers after 
a new and better way of human life this distinction is 
one of great import. Nor need I hesitate to say that 
my personal sympathies go out strongly to those who 
hold that a healthy commune must be a commune of 
tested and harmonious and eongenial spirits, and that 
one which opens its doors to all, however worthy in 
other respects, will soon loosen its grasp upon common 
ideals and degenerate from a group into a crowd. But 
for my present purpose it suffices to indicate this as an 
example of the stirring questions which, after the long 

[ 168 ] 


EARTH AND FOLK 


days of labor in road or field, in barn and smithy, ex- 
ercise the minds of the Jewish pioneers. 

The new colonies then are either Kvuzoth or Moshavei 
Ovdim. The former are purely communistic settle- 
ments. But I must add at once that the word com- 
munistic is here to be taken literally and to be stripped 
of all political connotations. The colonists are not in- 
terested in the class struggle; they stand in no oppo- 
sition to the industrialists and merchants of the towns; 
they have, above all, no impulse toward imposing their 
experimental adventures in new forms of living upon 
others. I do not mean that there are no parties or 
diverging views in Palestine. Both the Poale Zion 
(Workers of Zion) and the Hapoel Hazair (Young 
Worker) groups stand four-square upon the more or 
less accepted basis of Socialist doctrine. But all 
workers, whether in the colonies or in the towns, are 
primarily dedicated to the upbuilding of Palestine 
through creative Jewish effort and are prepared at any 
time to sink both doctrine and practice into the demands 
of this ultimate and supreme goal. 

The most recent but already extraordinarily suc- 
cessful type of colony is the Moshav Ovdim. In this 
type of colony each family is assigned in hereditary 
leasehold as much land as it can work. The vegetable 
garden and poultry yard are near the dwelling house; 
the fields of vine or grain or tobacco le farther off. 
Two fundamental principles govern the Moshav 
Ovdim. One is the elimination of hired labor. In case 
of need the colonists help each other. The second 
principle is that of codperative management, buying 


and selling. Thus the business manager, the physician 
[ 169 ] 


ISRAEL 


and apothecary, the various necessary mechanics serve 
the group which gains all the advantages of codpera- 
tion without that loss of the more traditional kind of 
family life which, at least to the observer, the structure 
of the Kvuzah entails. 

Before proceeding to a description of individual 
colonies or groups of colonies I must dwell on a final 
and most important characteristic of all the new rural 
settlements in the land. Since these settlements are 
planned by the nation through the Zionist Organiza- 
tion and its funds, their character is never haphazard, 
their well-being and future are left to chance in practi- 
cally no respect. The land for a new colony is care- 
fully selected; the settlers are carefully selected and 
grouped. Then plans are drawn up. The new settle- 
ments will all be garden villages or garden cities. They 
will be beautiful; they will be beautiful in a way that 
is suitable to the landscape, the climate, the social 
structure. In Jerusalem the admirable Richard Kauf- 
mann draws plans and sees the vision of each individual 
colony. The landscape gardening and the architecture 
will in each case be adapted to the terrain of the in- 
dividual colony. But one broad principle governs all 
these plans: each village or town will be grouped about 
some height on which will stand library, school, temple. 
A tiny acropolis will crown each settlement from which 
streets will melt into gardens and gardens into fields 
and forests. . . . Today, alas, none of these plans are 
much more than plans. Except in the suburbs of the 
cities Kaufmann’s dreams remain dreams. The Jewry 
of the world has not yet wholly awakened to the neces- 
sity and duty of that great national and creative act 

[170 ] 


EARTH AND FOLK 


which must be done in Palestine both for Israel and 
for mankind... . 

A little northwest of Jerusalem on the Jaffa road 
lies the Kvuzah of Kiriat Anavim, the city of grapes. 
Woods and well tilled fields and wooden bee-hives in 
a broad meadow lead to a large farmyard. On the 
eastern side of the yard stand the living barracks of 
the one hundred people who cultivate the four thou- 
sand dunam (circa one thousand acres) assigned to 
them. The one-story barracks are of unpainted wood, 
browned by sun and rains. Flowers and shrubs are 
planted beside them. But they are rude inside as well 
as out. Iron beds of the plainest and hardest stand 
in the sleeping barracks. In the dining hut which 
serves all social purposes rough benches without backs 
stand beside the long rough heavy wooden table. A 
few unframed prints are tacked to the brown walls. 
The floor is broken here and there. At one end of 
the dining barrack, in a large wooden cupboard, is 
stored the one wealth of these pioneers—a small library 
of well-thumbed books. Beyond the eating hut and 
the kitchen are a few tiny separate rooms for the mar- 
ried couples. ‘These rooms are very neat, well-scoured 
as is every place and object in the settlement, but as 
stripped of any appliance of ease as the cells of the 
severest monastic order. A better built hut houses the 
babies and tiny children and the trained nurses that 
care for them. But the terrible ecomomy that must 
be practised reduces everything here, too, to the sole 
standard of hygiene and safety from the weather. To 
live here and toil here requires a strength and austerity 
of soul, a patience and a fortitude before which praise 

: [171 ] 


ISRAEL 


itself falls silent. For it must never be forgotten that 
the men and women in these Kvuzoth are not hard- 
ened and insensitive peasants. They are city-people, 
students, thinkers, with nerves made sensitive by gen- 
erations of persecution, with minds made acute by two 
thousand years of study and meditation, with senses 
that cry out for beauty and music and modulated 
speech. Jews... It is upon seeing such a scene as the 
dining-barrack of Kariat Anavim, that I have felt as 
though no man, having seen it, could wait to go to 
the Jews of America and say: Forget names and the 
names of policies and divisions of opinion that last a 
year. Here are people of our blood destroying Ghetto 
and exile, destroying them not by futile argument but 
by the creative act of an heroic life. Who shall say 
hereafter of the Jew that he is unproductive and sloth- 
ful and can live by barter and by chaffering alone? 
The way of these pioneers could be made a little less 
barren. ‘Their progress could be made less painfully 
slow. They will be independent in good time. They 
are but breaking the new earth of the land today. Do 
not haggle; do not ask; give. .. . 

At the northern end of the farmyard stand the 
stables and barns. These are built not of wood but 
of concrete. The cattle and the harvest must be well- 
housed. ‘The cow-barn is of the most modern and ap- 
proved type. Miulk and butter, honey, fruits and table- 
grapes are the chief products of this colony. The 
colonists show their calves with pride. They are cross- 
ing Kuropean cattle with the native Arab stock. Thus 
they are producing a breed that can stand the climate 
and give as much milk as a Jersey or a Holstein. Every- 

[172 ] 


EARTH AND FOLK 


thing has to be created—the breeds of cattle and poul- 
try, the soil and the shade. ... A young man from 
the Kvuzah looked across the fields. “We could be 
more productive if we had additional agricultural 
machinery, a few more head of cattle—a little, just 
a little more. For we here—we have only our 
hands. .. .” . 

Just north of Rishon-le-Zion is situated the girls’ 
Kvuzah of Nachlat Yehudah. Eighteen girls from 
Central and Eastern Europe under the leadership of 
Hannah Cezek live here and cultivate one hundred 
dunam of land. All that the Keren Hayesod could 
spare them was a loan of four hundred and fifty pounds. 
They built two sheds and bought some second-hand 
tents. They bought a few cows and chickens and pro- 
ceeded to establish a tree-nursery. When the rains 
of the first winter set in the tents were soaked and 
the girls fell ill, They had to take to sleeping in a 
neighboring colony and walking to and from their 
work. They walked in bare feet. They had no money 
for shoes, which are dear. ‘They were paying back 
the loan of the Keren Hayesod; they were planning 
to buy a bull and more chickens. They wanted to be- 
come economically productive at any cost. At the end 
of their first year they had paid back three hundred and 
sixty pounds and had bought their poultry and their 
bull. They had a tree-nursery of one hundred thousand 
saplings. They had a well-equipped poultry yard. 
They were still barefoot and still sleeping in tents and 
a little afraid of the rains of the second winter. I 
stood with the leader and a group of the girls beside 

a shed, near flowers that had been planted, near the 
[ 173 ] 


ISRAEL 


endless rows of the tree-nursery. Women not with- 
out cultivation of the mind and heart, nurtured in touch 
with all that the great centers of European civilization 
offer, full of the natural grace of girlhood. . . . They 
had, in their old lives, known nothing of these things. 
They were, they told me laughing, forced to find an 
agricultural technique with the soul. . . . They were 
finding it. Their cattle and poultry are flourishing. 
What exercised their minds was the stupid fact that 
the earthen-ware pots for the tree-nursery were still 
being imported and not manufactured in Eretz Israel. 
It was not they who complained of the barrenness of 
their dining and living shed, of the tents, of their bare 
feet. It was my friend and guide who pointed out 
these things. Why had those girls come here? A 
fundamental question. For it must never be forgot- 
ten that the Chaluzim and Chaluzoth, the young 
pioneers of both sexes, are the best, the strongest in 
mind and body, the most capable of high idealism and 
high devotion from the countries of their birth. The 
half-hearted, the compromisers, the selfish, the intent 
on their own profit do not come. Perhaps the answer 
is that which a friend in Jerusalem, an American, gave 
for himself. It is the spiritually sensitive who come 
here and brave these hardships and, often enough, fling 
away life and health, for the sake of inner harmony, 
inner oneness. ‘They have not fled the outer struggle 
of Galuth. They are the type who would have suc- 
ceeded in the struggle. The hardships of the body 
are here. They have escaped the false position, the 
moral discomfort, the thousand restraints and inhibi- 
tions and subtle injustices of their old lives. Here 
[174 ] 


EARTH AND FOLK 


they stand upon their own earth; they are among their 
own folk. Life takes on a new freedom and natural- 
ness, a new spontaneity. The present is unspeakably 
difficult; the future not yet certain. But every hour 
that passes is a creative hour. The girls’ heads are 
erect. They are no longer suppliants or intruders, 
forced into false humility or angry arrogance, They 
are the daughters of the people of the land. They 
are themselves. ... 

I have dwelt on the Kvuzah of Kiriat Anavim and 
the Girls’ Kvuzah at Nachlat Yehuda not because the 
groups are different from others or better or even more 
representative. But there are now about eighty-five 
rural settlements in Palestine. I did not see them all. 
Of the many I saw I had no choice but to select those 
which by virtue of mood or weather or the quality of 
human faces and voices seemed to me to speak most elo- 
quently and truly of the earth and its folk. 


III 


When you cross the highlands of Samaria north of 
the Arab city of Jenin there spreads before you the 
famous valley of Jezreel. It extends almost from the 
Jordan on the east to a point beyond Nazareth on the 
west and north. Here where at last after the endless 
hills the land is level and full of springs the com- 
manders of ancient days chose their battle-ground. 
Here Sisera was pursued by the men of Barak; here 
the Midianites and the Amalekites assembled them- 
selves together while on the valley’s eastern edge, near 
the spring of Harod, Gideon and all the people that 

[175 | 


ISRAEL 


were with him encamped. The valley has known the 
tread of the Egyptian and the Syrian and of the ele- 
phants of Antiochus. A knoll is pointed out at which 
in this old land ended the triumphant march of Na- 
poleon. In the last days, the legend runs, the battle 
of Armageddon will be fought upon this plain. 

During recent centuries this valley, like every other 
part of Palestine, fell into utter ruin and neglect. But 
while drought reigned in the hills, poisonous swamps 
made life impossible here. The springs that abound 
in the valley overstepped their basins and the old water- 
courses and turned the land into marshes. The Arabs 
called the western spring Ain Samune or Poison Well, 
and believed that anyone who drank of the water was 
certain to die of malaria. Forty years ago it was at- 
tempted to found a German colony here. ‘The colonists 
died or fled. Pestilence steamed from this piece of 
earth and the Arabs avoided it in both real and super- 
stitious terror. 

Four years ago the Jewish National Fund began 
the work of drainage. Three years ago the Keren 
Hayesod began to plant colonies on the drained land. 
Today the greater part of the Emek Jezreel is in our 
hands. Jews of the Gdud Avodah, the battalion of 
labor, entered the steaming swamps; they turned the 
waters of the springs into natural channels or pipes; 
they gathered the swamp-water into reservoirs; they 
discovered that the western wells had been polluted by 
the sheep of the natives. Today malaria is stamped out. 
The valley is a place of woods and fields and delight- 
ful villages. We stood beside the spring of Harod and 
saw it gushing from the deep cave in the hillside 

[176 ] 


EARTH AND FOLK 


and leaned over and scooped up the water in our hands 
and drank. We entered the cool cave and breathed the 
clean, fresh air, and came out into the sunlight and drew 
in the warmer air fragrant with the scents of harvest. 
We drove from village to village and saw the sunlight 
upon the sleek backs of the golden brown cattle and 
heard the hum of the tractor and the echo of the smith’s 
hammer at the forge. At Merhavia, God’s Free Place, 
we had luncheon at the neatest and tinest of inns. The 
little parlor of the inn was cool and restful. Our host 
gave us soup and chicken and fresh vegetables and 
country cheese, sweet and bland, and ripe olives. We 
sat on the little veranda of the inn. The fertile valley 
spread out before us to the circle of the hills. A wind 
stirred the bushes. A calf came from the little farm- 
yard and put its nose into our hands. A dog romped. 
The print of olden wars seemed obliterated; the mias- 
mas of a few years ago seemed a legend. Israel had 
brought peace. 

During the past three years the colonization activi- 
ties of the Keren Hayesod have been centered to a large 
extent on the Emek Jezreel and its immediate environs. 
The colonies have been of the two types already de- 
scribed in outline, and it will suffice to deal somewhat 
more intensively with one important and representa- 
tive settlement of each kind: the Kvuzah of Ain Harod 
and the Moshav Ovdim of Nahalal. 

The commune situated, as its name shows, by the 
spring of Harod, is a settlement of the Gdud Avodah, 
the legion of labor, which indeed has its central or 
governing council here. The communism of the sev- 
eral hundred young men and women who live here is 

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ISRAEL 


wholly unpolitical. It is idealistic and experimental. 
Its aim is simply to find a new and better way of 
life for the worker. The fundamental principle of the 
colony is that it shall be self-sustaining. Hence, in 
addition to the cultivation of its land, to dairy and 
poultry husbandry, it operates a smithy, a large car- 
penter’s shop that builds anything from a bee-hive to 
a wagon, a tailor’s, a shoemaker’s, a locksmith’s shop. 
There is a hospital, a small museum of natural history, 
a library of two thousand volumes, a créche, a chil- 
dren’s house and a school. The discipline within this 
strictly self-governing body is severe. At frequent 
councils the work of the colony is planned and the 
concrete tasks assigned. ‘There is complete equality 
in duty and profit-sharing. Every attempt is made to 
keep all profits within the group for its development 
and extension. Through the breeding of horses, cattle, 
poultry and through the activities of the shops the 
colony has provided for more than its own needs and 
is beginning to supply those of neighboring settlements. 
On the strictly agricultural side the colony raises grain, 
wine, bananas, tobacco and has, like every settlement, 
a large tree-nursery for the gradual reforestation of 
the land. | 
In order to judge fairly of the future and the life 
of such a commune as that of Ain Harod, one must 
try to share the hopes and dreams of the colonists. 
Today they live and work in large, temporary bar- 
racks. Their intention is to build their permanent 
houses on rising ground a few hundred yards away 
from their present situation. The air will be cooler 
there and the view broader and more beautiful. The 
[178 ] 


\ 


EARTH AND FOLK 


permanent houses that are to be built are to be spacious 
and comfortable, however devoid of luxury and show. 
They will afford, one may be sure, thorough opportu- 
nities for study, for music, for social intercourse. 

What strikes one in the barracks as they are today 
is the discomfort, the crowdedness, the terrible lack of 
privacy. We arrived at the dinner hour. In the huge 
eating shed several hundred people were eating at the 
rude tables. The benches had no backs. The dishes 
and utensils were of the coarsest. There was clatter 
and noise. ‘There were flies. There was a sense of 
haste, of improvisation. Had these people been peas- 
ants with the nerves and the appetences of peasants one 
would have harbored no doubts. But one had only 
to look at the heads of the young men and women. 
They, like oneself, were able to be contented with naked 
simplicity of life. But were they quite satisfied with 
this hubbub, this—I am forced to use a very plain word 
—messiness? Was the sense of moral discomfort that 
I felt here for the one and only time in Palestine merely 
the echo of my own wretched bourgeois sensibilities? 
It may be so. And the rather stern young man who 
showed us the colony cut me short with an epigram: 
“A commune is no barrack.” (Kommune ist nicht 
Kaserne.) Well, it ought not to be. And perhaps 
it will not be. If itis, however, I think the large Kvuzah 
is likely to disappear despite its unquestionable eco- 
nomic efficiency. 

We saw the house of the little children and parents 
snatching what seemed to us a pitiful and again 
crowded glimpse of both the children and each other 
before, the dinner hour being over, each had to return 

[179 ] 


ISRAEL 


to his or her appointed task. If each couple had only 
been able to see its child alone. . . . We saw the din- 
ner of the larger children. ‘There are, yet, only a few. 
They sat huddled about their teacher, a scholarly but 
rather forlorn-looking young man. If he has to spend 
his whole day with his pupils, how can he retain fresh- 
ness and edge of mind? But that is his task. And 
the task of the parents is in field or shop and the 
task of the children is to study and to grow up. And 
suppose among these children there are artist natures 
—creatures born to think, to write, to make music. 
But I need hardly suppose. Are they not Jews? 

I know the answers to my criticisms and I know how 
valid and serious the answers are. How much chance 
has the average proletarian anywhere to see his chil- 
dren? Here at least he does see them in peace and 
freedom and the sense that they are being cared for 
with great skill and perfect kindness. What does the 
development of a probably second-rate critic or fiddler 
matter in comparison to the success of an experiment 
which may find a new and better and nobler way of 
life for the workers first of this and then perhaps of 
other lands? How true these objections are. And 
how true it is also that I cannot by an effort of the 
will assume the inner development of these younger 
men and women from the east of Europe and enter 
into the spirit of their communist austerity! To me the 
creative individual is the aim, fruit, goal, meaning of 
human life. And are we not a people of individualists, 
protestants, moral revolutionaries? I am assuredly no 
vulgar anti-Bolshevik. But in the large Kvuzah I see a 
contamination of our life by the supineness, the mass- 

[ 180 ] 


EARTH AND FOLK 


life, the morbid and dangerous submersion of personal- 
ity that seems to mark the Russian character whether 
under Czar or Soviet. 

I hasten to add that this is not all I saw at Ain Harod. 
I saw magnificent self-sacrifice, magnificent fortitude, 
magnificent singleness of purpose in the pursuit of an 
end embraced. I saw human qualities that cannot but 
stand in good stead in the development of any land or 
any people. Concrete social aim, concrete experiments 
in social structure can and will change. The spirit be- 
hind them remains. And the spirit counts. 

What I have said of Ain Harod may be taken to 
apply to the neighboring Kvuzoth of Tel Joseph and 
Beth Alpha. Agriculturally and industrially these col- 
onies, even in their primitive state, are triumphs. They 
have conquered the land and made a garden of it. They 
have vindicated the courage, the endurance, the pioneer- 
ing ability of the Jew. As social experiments they fill - 
my Western mind with misgiving and dismay. 

Profoundly different is the impression made by the 
Moshav or small-holders’ settlement of Nahalal. The 
principle that there shall be no hired labor prevents the 
possibilities of social injustice as securely as the Kvuzah 
system; the cooperative purchase of essential materials, 
sale of produce, the cooperative activities of building, 
deep-plowing, afforestation weld the settlers into a ho- 
mogeneous working-group. The group operates as a 
group. But itis composed of families, each of which has 
a home, gardens, fields. Thus there is both privacy and 
flexibility. There is the wide and necessary margin for 
the play of personality in labor and recreation. The 
adults assemble in communal council. Then they go 

[181 ] 


ISRAEL 


home. The children attend the communal school and 
go home. And the liberty of going home is as funda- 
mental and important in any healthy human society 
as the liberty of leaving a place that has ceased, in spiri- 
tual fact, to be a home. 

What, at all events, is indisputable is the happy moral 
atmosphere of Nahalal. The village is built upon an 
almost circular hillock which rises gradually in the 
middle of the fruitful valley. The plans of Kaufmann, 
according to which it was laid out, are admirably adapt- 
ed to the landscape and the needs of the settlement. 
On the top of the hillock stand the communal offices, 
the codperative stores, the school, the temple, all still 
housed of course in temporary and provisional buildings. 
Around the rim of the hill in a perfect circle are built 
the houses of the,seventy-five families of farmers. The 
radii from the circumference to the communal center are 
the streets on which live the mechanics and profes- 
sional men whom the colony employs. Behind each 
farmer’s house stretches in the segment of a greater 
circle concentric with the first his garden and vegetable 
garden and farm-yard with stable, barn and poultry 
house. There is an admirable union of harmony and 
convenience in the planning of the village which seems 
to coincide with the temper of the men and women who 
live and labor here. 

Beyond the last circle of the village stretch the actual 
farms of one hundred dunam each. From the size of 
these farms (circa twenty-five acres each) it is clear 
that the cultivation must be of the most skilful and 
intensive kind and that the vegetable garden, the cattle 
and poultry husbandry that are carried on near each 

[ 182 ] 


EARTH AND FOLK 


house represent an important item in the economy of 
each family. 

In addition to the farms there is an agricultural school 
and experiment station for girls at Nahalal. Here are 
the delightful tree-nurseries that one sees everywhere; 
here is carried on the important work of crossing Kuro- 
pean with Arab cattle and Wyandottes and Rhode 
Island Reds with the native chickens so as to produce 
breeds that shall be both hardy and profitable. So suc- 
cessful have these experiments been that while the native 
cow, for instance, yields an average of six hundred liters 
of milk a year, the cow bred at Nahalal has an annual 
yield of from two thousand to two thousand five hun- 
dred liters. These humble facts, rightly looked upon, 
take hold of the imagination. When have Jews gone 
into malarial marshes and drained them and stamped 
out disease and planted lovely villages where for cen- 
turies the place was a miasmic waste? When have they 
planted forests and produced new breeds of domestic 
animals? When, above all, have they done that as Jews? 

It is an unforgettable experience to wander through 
one of the gardens and farm-yards of Nahalal. The 
farmer’s house is small. But flowers are all about it. A 
sense of ample country peace comes to you from it. 
The farmer, a scientifically trained agriculturist, shows 
you the vegetables, the calves of his own breeding, the 
glistening colts, the large American turkeys that flourish 
here. In a sunny corner near the neat barn he shows 
you his aged father at some light task. He has brought 
the old men hither from some stony and harsh Ghetto 
of Eastern Europe. And in the very posture of that 


old man, in his very gestures you can see the great 
[ 183 ] 


ISRAEL 


healing of Palestine. That old man’s feet, accustomed 
to wander on strange and stony ways, press the soft 
earth; his hands touch living plants with tenderness; 
his ears hear the speech of his fathers; his eyes behold 
the fruitful fields, the new forests, the vineyards and 
orchards of Eretz Israel. I am not unaware, as I shall 
show farther on, of the dangers that lurk in a too narrow 
re-nationalization of Jewry, nor of the fact that, with 
our utmost efforts, only a small percentage of the Jews 
of the world can ever hope to live in the homeland. 
But I shall never forget that aged man in the farm- 
yard of Nahalal. Nor do I believe that any human 
being who can see with the eye not only of the body 
but of the spirit could forget him.... 

Afternoon came and evening. The horizon above the 
circling hills turned into a sheet of rose under which 
the hills were somber and’ majestic. Before the huge 
stars began to droop a sickle moon floated in the sky 
over the village of Balfouria—the completest of the 
Palestinian villages. The streets are lined with little 
white houses and behind each house stands a white barn 
and both house and barn are covered with orange-colored 
tiles. There are no sheds or barracks here. ‘The Ameri- 
can Zion Commonwealth (Kehillath Zion) by selling 
shares and lending the colonists modest but sufficient 
sums for the immediate necessities of both a civilized 
life and a scientific system of agriculture, has succeeded 
in planting a village here which shows what the other 
villages may one day become. People stood in their 
front-gardens on that evening or sat on their verandas 
after the heat and work of the day, and the cool winds 


from the hills stirred trees that stood black against the 
[ 184 ] 


EARTH AND FOLK 


roseate sky. Balfouria is a Moshav Ovdim like Nahalal. 
Here too are the homes of men. But here too no land 
is held as private property and no hired labor is em- 
ployed. Here, too, the social ideals of the Prophets shall 
prevail. 

Even from so selective an account as this I must not 
omit the famous colony of Dagania Aleph. It lies south 
of Lake Kinnereth in the tropical valley of the Jordan 
on the river’s eastern bank. It was founded in 1908 
on a tract of eight thousand dunam. The eighty mem- 
bers of the group were dedicated from the start to the 
ideals of the small Kvuzah: the elimination of the 
struggle for existence on a basis of equality; the peace- 
ful (not anti-capitalistic) development of new forms 
of social living; the restriction of the group in number 
and quality. The striking economic and social success 
of Dagania is doubtless due to the third of the three 
principles. A small group of comrades and friends, 
men and women who unite tireless idealism with prac- 
tical sagacity, has accomplished a notable work here. 
Despite the inevitable set-back of the war years the 
prosperity of the colony is such that it has been able to 
found a second settlement: Dagania Beth. Communal 
funds are invested in various congenial undertakings 
throughout the land. Yet in this case at least success 
has not quenched the spirit of the founders. Delicate 
women whose health sometimes requires a change from 
the broiling heat of the Jordan Valley hesitate to visit 
friends or relatives in the cool hill-lands for fear that 
their labor and their presence may be needed in the 
Kvuzah to which they have dedicated their lives. 

Beautiful avenues of trees lead to the inner yard of 

[ 185 ] 


ISRAEL 


Dagania. A handsome three-story communal house 
with dwelling rooms and clubrooms is being completed. 
The houses now in use are commodious and agreeable 
to the eye. It goes without saying that the stables are 
models of their kind, that modern agricultural imple- 
ments and the best scientific methods are employed. 
The colony, now in its seventeenth year, shows what the 
small Kvuzah can accomplish through its founders. 
When these age, when their children grow up other 
problems may arise. But their work is permanent. 
Dagania is unforgettable. A noble avenue of cy- 
presses leads to the bank of the Jordan. Here, we were 
told, young couples stroll in the cool of the evening. 
Trees shade the river bank. The vision crosses the 
river to the hills that roll beyond Lake Kinnereth to 
Safed. Far and shadowy loom the heights of Lebanon. 
Intense stillness. Intense glow of light. At one’s feet 
lies the river which is broad here and shallow before 
the winter rains. A group of Arabs is crossing it. Men 
and women with their robes girdled to their thighs wade 
through the stream. They lead the slow, grave, rocking 
camels. The aged, white-garbed sheikh fords the river 
on his horse. Thus might Abraham have crossed the 
immemorial river at this spot where people of his blood 
dwell once again... | | 


IV 


I have spoken constantly of the methods used by our 
farmers in Palestine. These methods are the results of 
the studies and practical experiments of the Zionist 
Organization’s Institute of Agriculture and Natural 

[ 186 ] 


EARTH AND FOLK 


History at Tel-Aviv. Here in these laboratories and 
demonstration rooms the agricultural experiments un- 
dertaken at Ben Shemen and the other experimental 
farms are proposed, tested and interpreted. From here 
the practical labor of the colonists is directed. To il- 
lustrate the precise function of the Institute in the 
land I can do no better than give an outline of what 
was told me by the admirable director, Dr. Eleazari- 
Volcani. 

Jewish agriculture is today at a half-way house. In 
the home market it still finds it difficult to compete 
with the Arabs. One reason for this is that agricultural 
machinery is a convenience but is not necessarily pro- 
ductive. The Arab plows only half an acre a day. But 
his plow costs one pound. His subsistence costs next 
to nothing. His mentality is so unawakened that the 
long day with the wooden plow and the bullock does 
not strike him as a waste of time and irritate him. 
The Jew uses an American plow that costs ten pounds. 
He has a horse. He works swiftly and intelligently and 
accomplishes vastly more than the Arab. But that more 
is not yet enough to pay for the plow, the horse, the 
horse’s fodder, to give the plowman the difference be- 
tween his subsistence, simply and austerely as he lives, 
and the Arab’s handful of dates. The Jew is a EKuro- 
pean and usually an intellectual. He needs food, soap, 
something to read. One must grasp the two mentali- 
ties, Arab and Jewish, in relation to the two types of 
plow, work, life, to understand the difficulty of our 
agriculturists in the markets of the homeland and its 
environs. 

For competition in the world markets, on the other 

[187] 


ISRAEL 


hand, Jewish agriculture and Jewish methods are not 
yet sufficiently advanced. How, for instance, can the 
Palestinian orange, unwrapped and unadvertised, com- 
pete with the “Sunkist” oranges of California, the in- 
ternational advertising of which unites the precision of 
science with grace of art? 

The solution of the entire problem is evidently a 
cultivation so scientific and intense that the productivity 
of the Jewish dunam, whether it bears grain or oranges 
or tobacco or vegetables or bananas or castor-oil or 
olives, shall be so increased as to annihilate the disad- 
vantages of the colonist in both the home market and 
the markets of the world. To this task the Institute 
is addressing itself. That rapid and ordered observa- 
tion which we call science must shorten the way. Thus 
the Institute studies in one field the increase of fertility 
due to a favorable time of sowing; in another that due 
to a new depth of sowing; in a third it uses both factors 
and studies the results. It brings all the experience of 
mankind to bear upon the problems of Palestinian agri- 
culture. Its department of economic entomology has 
already a triumphant record in its fight against the 
animal life that destroys crops. These departments are 
issuing bulletins that are beginning to command the 
attention of similar scientific institutes in various parts 
of the world." The difficulties of the Palestinian agri- 


culturist, in a word, are being faced and solved as those 

1 Bulletin 1. The Coccide of Palestine. First Report on this family. 
By Dr. F. 8. Bodenheimer. Tel-Aviv. 1924. 

Bulletin 2. The Chemical Composition of Palestine Olives and their 
Oils. The Chemical Composition of the Sesame Oil Cake. Composition of 
Rain Falling et Tel-Aviv. By Dr. F. Menchikowsky. Tel-Aviv. 1924. 

Bulletin 3. Preliminary Report on the Agricultural Aspects of a Sugar 
Industry in Palestine, By M. Eleazari. Tel-Aviv. 1924. 


[ 188 | 


EARTH AND FOLK 


of the American farmer have been and are. We are not 
only reclaiming the desert and afforesting the hills and 
raising crops where for centuries there were stone and 
sand dunes. We are putting the entire agriculture of 
the Near East on a scientific basis. Egypt and Trans- 
Jordania, Syria and Mesopotamia will profit by our 
studies and our experiments. We are not only saving 
some of the dispersed of Israel, but adding to the wealth 
and garnered wisdom of mankind. 


[189 ] 


CHAPTER VI 
WORK AND DREAM 


I 


I wap heard many things about Tel-Aviv, the Jewish 
city. The last thing I heard before I saw it with my 
own eyes was from a kindly old gentleman in Jerusalem. 
He looked over his glasses. “You will like Tel-Aviv,” 
he said, “it’s like Far Rockaway.” 'There was to me, 
later on as I recalled it, a deep pathos in this saying of 
my old friend. Even in New York he had been con- 
scious of that atmosphere of hostility to the Jew which 
is so strong in certain circles and spreads forth from 
them. When summer came he had retired with his 
family to the Jewish summer hotels or cottage settle- 
ments at Far Rockaway. And since Tel-Aviv is also 
by the sea, the comparison seemed to him pleasant and 
complete. | 

It is, in fact, not so complete as he thought. The 
Jews who go to Far Rockaway are comfortable there. 
But because they go there the place has, to very many 
people, a discredited and half-comic air. Hence the 
“refined” assimilationist who shudders at a kosher sign 
jn a butcher’s window doesn’t go to Far Rockaway and 
indeed considers it a little vulgar. Well, it is vulgar. 
For the vulgus, the crowd of ordinary human beings, 
assembles there. I, too, share the Horatian fear of the 
profane and noisy. But man in the mass is not, from 

[ 190 | 


WORK AND DREAM 


this narrow point of view, a delightful or a soothing 
spectacle in any place. If it were to come to a decision, 
however, I should go to Far Rockaway rather than to 
Newport. For among the seething crowd of Far 
Rockaway I should find, sooner or later, a minority that 
cares for art, letters, music, thought; I should find even 
among the others an inherited respect for the things 
and interests that I represent in the world. At New- 
port I should find nothing. And its ceremonials of 
sport and pleasure and society would find in me an 
eternal alien... ... 

The comparison between F'ar Rockaway and Tel- 
Aviv is one of far-reaching implications. We shall be, 
as Jews and as human beings, upon a better way when 
Far Rockaway is more like Tel-Aviv; when those who 
now spurn Far Rockaway and hanker for Newport 
will go to Far Rockaway in order to make it more like 
Tel-Aviv; when Tel-Aviv will cease to offer even the 
slightest resemblance to Far Rockaway because the good 
people who frequent Far Rockaway will not be able to 
bring a whiff of its present flavor to Tel-Aviv.... 

For Tel-Aviv is not a city to which people flee to 
crowd against each other for comfort; it is not a city 
of refuge, a city of denial, a city whose citizens would 
rather, perhaps, be in Cairo or Damascus, as so many 
of the transitory denizens of Far Rockaway would per- 
haps rather be at Newport or Bar Harbor. Tel-Aviv 
is a city built by men who wanted that city, who built 
it to express themselves, who molded it first for them- 
selves but also for their posterity. 

One must not expect too much. I heard many com- 
plaints in Palestine. The houses in Tel-Aviv are not 

[ 191 ] 


ISRAEL 


beautiful. Some of them are cheap and pretentious and 
seem to have been built in imitation of the worst period 
of American domestic architecture. That is true. But 
people from Lodz or Brownsville did not, of course, 
come here with a new Jewish-Palestinian architecture 
ready in their minds. I keep a vivid recollection, on the 
other hand, of the small white house with its graceful 
arches and general air of dreamy amplitude in which 
we went to call on the eminent thinker and essayist 
Achad Ha’am. And if many of the houses are ugly, 
the palms about them are beautiful. These houses set 
in the glow of the light and surrounded by a semi- 
tropical vegetation strongly suggested to me certain 
streets in Charleston, in Savannah, in New Orleans. In 
those cities too you will find ugly houses and beautiful 
gardens; there, too, as in Tel-Aviv, you feel the magic 
of the ever-present sea. 

We are, moreover, a people given to the arts in time 
rather than to those in space. I observed that I was 
myself less offended by the ugliness of the houses in Tel- 
Aviv than I was pleased at the names of the streets which 
are called after poets, Yehuda Halevy and Bialik, after 
thinkers, Moses Hess and Achad Ha’am, after prophets 
of various sorts and ages, Rambam (Maimonides) and 
Herzl, after benefactors, Rothschild and Balfour. It 
pleased me to think of a city council that gave such 
names to streets, sure that these names would fall in with 
the tastes and ideas of the citizens. And what seemed 
to me the strongest plea for this city was a story I heard 
of a celebration that was given on the beach with bonfires 
and dances and singing, with the mass-life of the people 


expressing itself in the true folk way. The strongest 
[ 192 ] 


WORK AND DREAM 


plea—because this spontaneous celebration did not honor 
a politician or commemorate a victory but was a tribute 
brought to the loftiest and severest of modern Hebrew 
poets, Chaim Bialik. That is what I should expect of a 
Jewish city; it is by the example of such things that a 
Jewish city can justify itself among the cities of the 
world. : 

Tel-Aviv, moreover, is a young city. It was in 1909 
that sixty families met on the sand-dunes north of Jaffa 
and determined to build a clean and healthful residential 
suburb there. Sixteen years have passed and on those 
dunes has arisen a city of thirty thousand inhabitants 
with schools, colleges, temples, libraries, banks, shops, 
factories, hotels, newspaper offices. And no jail. Jewish 
policemen, unarmed, keep order and regulate the traffic. 
There is no prison in Tel-Aviv. The people of the city 
hope that it will never be necessary to build one. 

I am no economist. It would be fruitless for me to 
discuss the banks and industries of Tel-Aviv, to enter 
into the question raised by not a few people: on what 
solid foundation is the rapid development of the city 
based? Neither need I discuss the danger of specula- 
tion in real-estate values which seems now and then to 
sicker in from various parts of the world. The city 
glows with life, with a spontaneous and powerful will to 
be. I have compared the aspect of the streets with that 
of streets in certain American cities. Tel-Aviv differs 
from those cities by the healthy intensity of its atmos- 
phere. The people are building the city with joy. With 
joy in the building. There is neither gold nor iron nor 
oilin Palestine. You cannot get rich quick; you cannot 


exploit natural resources. The manufacturer has got 
[ 1938 | 


ISRAEL 


to work gradually, laboriously. He has to treat his 
workers justly. He has to create a demand for his 
building material or furniture or textiles or mineral 
waters or leather or sweets or electric batteries. A large 
building is planned—perhaps it is already completed— 
full of lofts for small industries. Many other like things 
were told to me and I was given pictures and plans and 
statistics. I do not underestimate these facts nor their 
meaning. Neither am I unaware of the dangers that 
lurk in certain aspects of the economic life of Tel-Aviv. 
These are the passing things. They are thus today and 
will be changing tomorrow. Perhaps they have already 
changed in the few weeks since I heard the Mediter- 
ranean surf thunder on the beach. I turn to what is 
fundamental and permanent. 

The Jews have built a city. They have not built it as 
entrepreneurs, furnishing the capital and hiring labor. 
They have built a city with their own hands. Every 
spadeful of earth has been turned up by Jews, every 
brick has been laid by Jews. The large ugly houses and 
the small charming houses and the superb Rutenberg 
Electric Light and Power Station have been planned by 
the minds and built by the hands of Jews. They have 
laid out the streets and avenues and made the sanitary 
arrangements and built the school system. The mayor, 
Mr. Dizengof, had never been a mayor before and the 
city councillors had never been city councillors before » 
and the policemen had assuredly never been policemen 
before. And Tel-Aviv is without any question one of 
the most hygienic, agreeable, ably and honestly admin- 
istered cities in the world. 

How long is it since the Jews have built a city? Some- 

[ 194 | 


WORK AND DREAM 


where between two thousand and three thousand years. 
And during that period the task of building and admin- 
istering a city has become, to speak mildly, more com- 
plicated. Hence between the draining and cultivating 
of the Emek Jezreel on the one hand and the building 
of the city of Tel-Aviv on the other, the Jews have 
furnished proof of their ability to do that fundamental 
work on which civilization is based. The anti-Semite 
who speaks of a nation of hucksters and exploiters and 
middlemen and commercial nomads ought to be finally 
silenced. This is the first time in the course of many 
ages that the Jews have had a chance to do the produc- 
tive work of civilization. They have done it with unsur- 
passed adaptability, zeal, skill, honesty. 

The anti-Semite will not, of course, be silenced. It 
is at this point that I part company with my radical 
Zionist friends. 'They accept the accusation of essential 
unproductivity in the diaspora however guiltless we may 
be of it. They accept the fact and in Palestine furnish 
the answer and the remedy. It is not for such reasons 
that I love both the villages of the Emek and the streets 
of Tel-Aviv. For these reasons are purely romantic 
ones. Itis aromantic myth that the country is pure and 
the city foul, that a merchant is essentially and neces- 
sarily more ignoble than he who cultivates the soil, that 
the work of the hand has a moral value which the work 
of the mind lacks. In a complicated modern civilization, 
whatever its specific economic forms, every function is as 
necessary as every other. However hard the peasant 
delves, the modern city would die without the carriers 
and exchangers of goods. A people of traders, physi- 
cians, teachers, artists, even lawyers is in any place this 

[ 195 ] 


ISRAEL 


side of Utopia as productive and honorable as a people 
of farmers, factory hands, hewers of wood and drawers 
of water. Nor do we observe the Gentile, even the anti- 
Semite, avoiding the “parasitic” activities of the Jew. 
In the West, at least, there is no lack of Gentile bankers, 
merchants, middle-men of all sorts. And in the trades 
of intellectual mediation, such as journalism and teach- 
ing, nothing is more obvious than the Gentile’s desire to 
drive the Jew forth and monopolize the field for him- 
self. No, this entire controversy in regard to the pro- 
ductive and the unproductive work of civilization arises 
from a convenient romantic fiction. A gypsy fiddling 
delightfully at a roadside inn is as good a man and 
member of the human brotherhood as the peasants who 
dance to his strains. If we were, speaking in the manner 
of a parable, a people of gypsies, I should be rather 
proud of it. But we are not. Our supposed lack of 
productivity is due to disuse brought about by historical 
causes that every schoolboy knows. For centuries we 
were prevented from holding land by the most cruel and 
relentless laws. No medieval guild accepted a Jewish 
member or a Jewish apprentice. To reproach us for not 
being farmers and tinsmiths is the last refuge of imper- 
tinent stupidity. To accept the reproach is to share the 
romantic muddleheadedness which gave it birth. 

The virtues of Tel-Aviv are not those of a treatise on 
Jewish apologetics. ... It had been a busy day and 
we were tired and went to bed early. But we could not 
sleep because young and old people strolled along the 
streets in groups and chatted and sang and the sound of 
their speech and song came in with the mild air through 
the wide open windows. Speech and song were in 

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WORK AND DREAM 


Hebrew, occasionally in Yiddish. And in those singing 
and speaking voices there was a freedom and a spon 
taneity that went straight to the heart. I had never 
heard Jews speak so or sing on summer nights on either 
Riverside Drive or Second Avenue. But suddenly I 
knew that they wanted to do so, that it was natural for 
them to do so, but that in New York they dared not 
do so because they knew that hostile ears would hear 
them and hostile lips would say: Vulgar, noisy 
JCWSiiec ss 

I stood by the window and saw the groups of people 
loitering under the palms. And there came to me the 
memory of another scene. A large and splendid foyer 
in a Jewish club in America. A hundred men and 
women eating hors-d’cwvres. Physicians, lawyers, 
journalists, bankers. Their wives. Clever women, most 
of them and charmingly gowned. The cock-tails are 
served and the hum of conversation rises. In the eyes of 
my friend whose guest I am I see a troubled look. “Did 
you ever,” she exclaims, “hear an American crowd make 
such a noise?” “No,” I answered quite truthfully. 
“But I like the zest and warmth and I’m quite sure the 
conversation is more intelligent in substance than—”’ 
My friend cut me short with a shiver. “I don’t like it.” 
She could not be at peace among her own people, among 
her own friends because the subtle and corrupting injus- 
tice of majority standards had sickered into the very 
crevices of her nerves. Why, in God’s name, should 
these people not be noisy? But indeed they were not at 
all noisy from any point of view but that of comparison 
with the most rigidly restrained Anglo-American so- 
ciety. ... The virtue of Tel-Aviv is that Jews can 

[ 197 ] 


ISRAEL 


be noisy there without hesitation. The highest virtue of 
Tel-Aviv is that its example may teach Jews to be noisy 
everywhere in the world. ... 

I think that Tel-Aviv will be a great city some day. 
Behind it the agricultural colonies will stretch out to 
Jerusalem, north to Haifa and northeast, through the 
valley of Jezreel to the Jordan. Great mills, such as 
already exist at Haifa will be built to grind the grain of 
the hinterland; there will be textile mills and tobacco 
factories and canning works for fruits and olives... . 
Instead of three thousand students there will be thirty 
thousand, instead of two publications twenty. And the 
purpose of all that will be to let the Jews be noisy. .. . 


On the eve of Simchat Torah, the feast of the rejoic- 
ing of the law, we went into the old city of Jerusalem 
to see the Chassidim dance. ‘The temple curved above 
us like a vast bell. In front of the ark a dozen men 
walked in the grave measures of a circular dance. Their 
robes and caps were of white satin; the scrolls of the law 
which they pressed to their bosoms were clothed in satin 
and silver and gold. ‘The candles shone with a steady 
light and the crowns and bells on the Torah scrolls 
glittered. What faces those men had! Above those 
beards of glossy black or wraithlike white there was an 
extraordinary blending of dignity and fervor. And one 
pale, pointed, youthful face pressed with closed eyes 
against the scroll was the eternal face of the martyrs of 
Israel who die on crosses or at stakes or on barricades 
or in political prisons for a thing not made with hands. 
: They danced; they chanted. “Out of the mouth 
of the Lord Israel shall be blessed. . . .” 

[ 198 | 


WORK AND DREAM 


Only a dozen. Their faith is with all the faiths of 
yesterday. It is the day of the stone-masons and the 
scientists and the poets and thinkers. But that dance 
and that chant are an eternal gesture and answer an 
eternal instinct. In Tel-Aviv, in the cities and villages 
of Palestine the children of Israel dance and chant with- 
out false shame or hidden fear. “Out of the mouth of 
the Dordewene 


II 


The houses and factories and schools of Tel-Aviv do 
not represent the entire building activity of the Jews in 
Palestine. This building activity ranks as an actual 
achievement next to the reclaiming and cultivation of the 
soil. It is largely the result of the labor of the last five 
years and is due to the activities of the codperative 
building guild called Solel Boneh. 

When, at the end of the World War, the gates of 
Palestine were reopened to immigration, the half-ruined 
agricultural colonies were totally unable to absorb the 
immigrants who sought to settle in the land. ‘The first 
necessity moreover for further settlement and for the 
actual opening of the land was the construction of roads. 
Since there were no capitalistic companies to hire 
laborers and bid for government contracts, the laborers, 
most of them newcomers and unaccustomed to hard 
manual toil, organized the Solel Boneh guild for build- 
ing and public works and built those magnificent roads 
that opened up the entire northern part of the country. 

Training its men, who had been students and indoor 
workers, to acquire the skill and endure the hardships of 


their new occupations, the Solel Boneh next proceeded 
[ 199 ] 


ISRAEL 


to relieve the scarcity of dwellings in the country. 
Through Zionist initiative mortgage banks were estab- 
lished; a staff of able engineers and architects guided the 
work; the incomparable adaptability of the Jewish 
worker was once more established. 

Since those earlier days the Solel Boneh has not only 
built the greater part of Tel-Aviv, but the new residen- 
tial quarters of Jerusalem, of Haifa, of Tiberias. It has 
constructed public buildings of all kinds, ranging :rom 
the beautiful Convalescent Home for workers at Mozah 
to the massive Electric Station at Tel-Aviv. It has 
erected dwelling-houses, factories, schools, hospitals; it 
has continued its road-building and has constructed 
barns and stables throughout the colonies. It has built 
houses of silicate brick, of cement blocks, of stone, of 
reénforced concrete and has mastered its necessary tech- 
nique with faultless efficiency. One of its most extraor- 
dinary achievements is the construction of the Imperial 
war cemetery and memorial at Beersheba. Yet this is 
only one of the many tasks which the guild has per- 
formed for the Palestinian Government, for the munici- 
palities and railways and for the Military Administra- 
tion. 

These dry facts take on human significance as one 
actually recalls the arches and spacious halls of the 
Mozah Convalescent home and visualizes once more the 
new pillars and capitals of that building which seem to 
have grown on that hillside from which one sees the taller 
hills on which Jerusalem stands. In the new quarters of 
Beth Hakerem and Talpioth in Jerusalem, in Bath 
Galim and Hakarmel near Haifa, in the Kiriat She- 
muel quarter of 'Tiberias there are houses, both large and 

[ 200 ] 


WORK AND DREAM 


small, which answer every need of comfort, of beauty, 
of adaptability to the climate and the landscape of the 
country. Finally one recalls the wooden bridge that 
spans the Jordan near Dagania, the new house of the 
commune and the road from Tiberias to Semach. 
Without initial capital and without government subsidy 
the Jewish workers in codperation are building roads 
and cities, even as they have drained swamps, planted 
forests and tilled the ruined earth into beauty and fer- 
tilttveran 

The Solel Boneh is, of course, only one among several 
associations of Jewish workers in Palestine. Some of 
these codperatives are practical, some political in their 
character. They are all united in the Central Organi- 
zation of Jewish Workers (Histadruth haklalith shel 
haovdim ha Ivrim) whose headquarters are in the Work- 
ers’ House of Tel-Aviv. A white house of two stories 
in the overwhelming light. Upstairs a small, shaded 
room—half library, half rude council chamber. As 
everywhere in Palestine except in a few private houses, 
complete austerity, complete carelessness of comfort. 
There is the burning idea . . . there is the work to be 
done . . . that is all. ... A man has come there to 
talk to me about the workers—a spare man in careless 
clothes with the hands of a laborer except for the shape 
of the fingers which are slim and mobile, with sunken 
cheeks and very speaking eyes, a good high forehead, a 
bristling mustache over a slightly protruding, ugly, elo- 
quent mouth. He has to talk to me through an inter- 
preter. He has spoken Hebrew so exclusively for so 
long that he has lost command of the languages of 
Galuth. I can watch him all the better for that reason; 

[ 201 ] 


ISRAEL 


I can fathom, all the more completely the utter earnest- 
ness, simplicity, single-mindedness of the man, the 
essential nobleness of that wanting of nothing for him- 
self, of everything for the workers, for the land, for 
the days and the generations to come. 

He spoke with the air of one who is “not fond of 
speaking or born to speak. A rather silent man orig- 
inally. But forced into speech by the duty of communi- 
cating the character of the work he had at heart. Speak- 
ing well now precisely because he did not care for speech. 
“Our aim is the regeneration of the working powers of 
the Jewish people. We want to render Jewish work 
both economically and culturally productive. In order 
to attain this end we workers sink all party differences. 
They exist but they do not divide. And that is so 
because, beyond theories and party platforms, we are 
trying to learn what to do from life itself. We really 
harbor no theory that is antecedent to practice. We 
workers must be the constructive element in Eretz Israel 
and in order to be that we must seek what unites, not 
what divides. And what is it that unites us here? Every- 
where else in the world we live and labor as.German 
Jews or English or Polish or American Jews. Here 
we are Jewish Jews. Here we face for the first time not 
the question of the right to labor but of the possibilities 
of labor. Here, for the first time, our labor can be 
creative. 

“In all the lands of the Galuth we live at the expense 
of others. We work within an economic structure, an 
economic organization built by others. Culturally as 
well as economically we trade with the fundamental 
values, the Urwerte, created by others. We become the 

[ 202 | 


WORK AND DREAM 


carriers and continuators of the creative values of others. 
Thence arises the nations’ instinct of opposition to us. 
Since we realize this it follows that in Eretz Israel we 
do not combat anti-Semitism. We are quite freed from 
that external conflict. Our conflict, our struggle here is 
an inner one: How to become a productive people. 

“What is given us here is the earth on which we can 
become a creative folk. It is this thought that unites the 
workers; an overwhelming majority of the workers 
desires this end, strains after this aim. And the workers 
know that this aim can be achieved only by national 
work, not by class struggle. There are Marxists in the 
land, undoubtedly. But they too join in the great, 
national, concentrated effort toward rendering Israel a 
productive people. 

“Our experiments in the land extend over forty 
years. And we found that as long as work was depend- 
ent on private initiative or philanthropic aid, there was 
no renewal of life. There were employers and employed 
and many of the employed were not Jews and so the old 
conflicts and problems arose that have always arisen in 
the lands of the Galuth. It was only when we began to 
work out of a national and codperative initiative, that 
there arose the Jewish worker, that we began to see the 
possibilities of a renewal in the economic, the political 
and the moral life of the nation. For, observe, private 
initiative needs profit. Profit means the export of goods. 
And the export of goods means dependence on the outer 
world. What we desire, above all, is to be self-sustain- 
ing, to export only an excess of commodities. This is 
the aim of the workers’ codperative experiments in town 
and country, of the guild, the Kvuzah, the Moshav 

[ 203 ] 


ISRAEL 


Ovdim. .. .” He stopped and leaned his head a little 
wearily on his hand. But almost instantly he brightened 
up again with a fine, though somber flash. “Remember 
please: we seek the way! All of our present experiments 
of social organization may be changed, may be, nay, 
probably will be transcended. Only—all land and all 
values and all properties belong to the nation and there 
must be no hired labor and no exploitation; there must 
be neither oppressors nor oppressed. ‘Thus the codpera- 
tive organizations regulate the conditions of labor and 
consumers’ associations, such as the Hamashbir, regu- 
late prices. ‘These associations are controlled and, if 
need be, checked by the banks, by the nation itself. But 
the ordinary safeguards and checks against excessive 
labor demands are not needed, since the workers are 
inspired by good sense and good-will and desire not the 
profit of their class or of any class but the increasing 
freedom and productivity of all Israel. This aim of the 
workers is constantly emphasized and intensified by the 
cultural work of the Histadruth or great organization. 
The organization employs one hundred people in its 
cultural work alone. It arranges courses in the Hebrew 
language and lectures, it operates evening schools; it 
sends out teachers to special groups for special purposes; 
it sends out traveling libraries of books in all languages 
to the remotest farms and labor camps; it publishes 
pamphlets and books; it maintains reading-rooms; it 
has organized concert associations and choruses and is 
at work on the beginnings of a people’s theater. . . .” 

I have let this man speak very much as he spoke to 
me since, as he himself so frankly admitted, both his- 
toric and economic theories are transitory. Spiritual 

[ 204 ] 


WORK AND DREAM 


facts and values alone are permanent. I do not think 
I know enough to exercise any criticism of his tentative 
economic theories. I am sure that his interpretation of 
the position of Israel in Galuth is narrow and romantic 
and discredited by the very fallacies of the Anti-Semite. 
All honest work is productive work. I am not unaware 
—how could I be?—of the fact that the Jewish artist 
and thinker seems often in Galuth, especially under the 
gaze of hostile eyes, to be working with the fundamental 
values, the Urwerte, of others. The deeper truth is that 
he is working, if he counts at all, with the Urwerte of 
mankind which are his as much as any others, that like 
the better of his Gentile compeers, he transcends the 
national limitations through which he inevitably works 
and belongs to his own people, to the people among 
whom he lives and creates and thus to all peoples. .. . 

But theories, as I have said, are transitory and formu- 
lations for aday. What I see is that dark, slim, earnest 
man in the workers’ house in Tel-Aviv. And behind 
him I see the many men and women, the workers, whom 
I met and with whom I spoke. It is their spirit and the 
spirit of their work that counts. They do not care for 
comfort or dainty food or well-made garments. ‘They 
live as best they can. They live by the heat and the light 
of the flame within. Yet they are simple and human 
and cheerful and unpretentious and not given to sound- 
ing words or the gestures of the reformer. They take 
both their hardships and their ideas as a matter of course. 
They are building up the land of Israel. But greater 
than the task is the spirit of the task and the example of 


it. And that spirit and that example belong even now 
[ 205 ] 


ISRAEL 


to the permanent possessions of all men and are becom- 
ing “part of our lives’ unalterable good. . . .” 

It belongs to the humanness of the situation that, 
outside of the Workers’ House once more I met a young 
man who smiled rather sardonically. “You’ve been 
talking to our friend A. in there? Well, did you know 
that he’s the executive secretary of the Hapoel Hazair 
(Young Workers’ Party)? They’re a terribly idealistic 
crowd!” 

“They may be,” I said. “But they represent a good 
many people. . They had twenty-three delegates in the 
last Histadruth conference.” 

“True,” he flung back. “But Achduth ha-Havodah 
(Palestinian branch of Poale Zion, World Zionist 
Socialist Party) had sixty-seven delegates.” 

“And are you people,” I asked, taking it for granted 
that he belonged to the Poale Zion, “so very hard- 
boiled?” 

He reflected for a moment. “I suppose not,’ he 
admitted. “Beyond all theoretical differences we do the 
same work and live the same life.” 


Tit 


The colonists and the workers generally enter the 
country at the port of Jaffa and proceed to the Immi- 
gration Station at Tel-Aviv. The station is housed in 
two Arab buildings. There have been neither means nor 
opportunity yet to construct an adequate station. The 
Arab houses are extraordinarily beautiful. But in those 
enormous and enormously lofty chambers and arcades 
there is a great waste of space. There could be at least 

[ 206 ] 


WORK AND DREAM 


two tiers of dormitories and beds where now there is 
only one. The psychological effect too, is not likely to 
be happy. The immigrant in his barrack will miss these 
solemn halls in which effendis entertained their guests, 
these high hushed chambers in which the ladies of the 
harem sat, these arcades with their far view out into the 
land. 

This immigration station, at all events, is supported 
and managed by the Zionist Organization which takes 
complete charge of Jewish immigration and relieves the 
Palestinian government of one of its normal functions. 
This is a point of the utmost importance. Voices are 
occasionally heard in England complaining of the ex- 
pense of Palestine to the British Empire. The Jewish 
immigrants who, by their labor, reclaim and enrich the 
territory of the Mandatory Power, are selected, brought 
into the country and settled in it by the Agency that 
represents the Jewish nation. Exclusive of loans to 
immigrants, of contributions to the workers’ kitchens 
which feed them, to the sick societies that care for them 
in case of need, and exclusive, too, of course, of the 
expenses of colonization, the mere process of bringing 
immigrants into the country costs the Zionist Organiza- 
tion over thirty thousand Egyptian pounds a year. 

It goes without saying that the Zionist station admits 
people into the country in strict conformity with the 
regulations of the Palestinian government. According 
to these, seven classes of persons are now permitted to 
enter. I. Tourists. II. Immigrants with a capital of 
five hundred Egyptian pounds. III. Members of the 
liberal professions. (The admission of members of this 
class, as such, has at least temporarily been abolished.) 

[ 207 ] 


ISRAEL 


IV. Dependents of Palestinian settlers established in 
the country who guarantee the maintenance of such 
dependents. V. Contract laborers certified by the Zion- 
ist Organization. ‘Their numbers depend on the coun- 
try’s capacity of economic absorption. VI. Persons 
desiring Palestinian residence for religious reasons. This 
class includes priests, clerics, missionaries of all Chris- 
tian churches, as well as pious Jews supported by the 
Chalukah. VII. Palestinian citizens expatriated dur- 
ing the war and desiring repatriation. 

It is clear that the Zionist Organization’s chief labors 
after the necessary formalities of immigration are con- 
cerned with class V. This class includes the chaluzim 
and chaluzoth who as farmers and workers furnish the 
broad and indispensable foundation for both the eco- 
nomic and national upbuilding of the land. The amount 
of help that must be given them varies greatly. None 
are admitted who have not had adequate preparation for 
the actual life and work of the country. Artisans are 
given loans for tools, for travel, for the care of them- 
selves and their families until they begin to draw wages. 
No one is pauperized or treated as an object of charity. 
Promissory notes are required as security for the loans 
extended. This method has proved most satisfactory. 
Agricultural workers are assigned to the colonies that 
need them or to the work of clearing new land, draining 
swamps, building roads for new colonies. The young 
women (chaluzoth) present a special problem. ‘They 
also are assigned to colonies or to the great schools for 
agriculture and poultry husbandry at Tel-Aviv or 
Nahalal. 


These dry facts are, plainly, of tremendous signifi- 
[ 208 ] 


WORK AND DREAM 


cance. The Jewish National Fund buys land; the Keren 
Hayesod brings people into the country and settles them 
on the land. It receives the immigrant; it finds him 
land or labor; it supports the cultural institutions which 
I shall discuss in the next chapter. It supports the 
scientific institutions which I have already described. In 
other words, the scattered Jewish people through its 
representatives is building up the land and founding a 
new and fruitful civilization in it at its own expense and 
without the slightest desire or hope of exercising political 
power. We desire to possess the land creatively and not 
in terms of power and force and dominance. A consti- 
tution will be drafted in time. Under it we expect equal 
rights with Arab and Christian. Nomore. For all that 
we bring to the land we ask no more than equality with 
the people of continuous residence in it. I say people of 
long continuous residence. I do not say natives. For 
in the truest sense we are the natives of the land who 
never wholly abandoned either a theoretical or a prac- 
tical claim to its possession. 

The briefest reflection will show this entire situation 
to be unique. Explorers have discovered new lands and 
have taken possession of them for their governments. 
Then and then only have colonists come in, usually on 
their private initiative, with flags and guns and soldiery 
to make possession of the land effective. Or else, espe- 
cially in modern times, great governments have settled 
the veterans of their wars on lands within their domin- 
ions. Behind all colonization there has been power; one 
of the objects of colonization has always been the exten- 
sion of power. The Jewish people has no power. It 


cannot levy taxes; it cannot enforce laws nor inflict 
[ 209 ] 


ISRAEL 


penalties. The money given by Jews in every part of 
the world to the great Zionist funds has been in the 
nature of a voluntary gift and its giving has exempted 
them from the payment of no tax, direct or indirect, in 
the lands of their residence and political allegiance. 
Thus every shekel given and every donation used for the 
upbuilding of Palestine represents a spiritual act of an | 
extraordinary and unique kind. You cannot compare 
the donations to moneys that people give for charity or 
for the support of churches. The Zionist donation is no 
badge of respectability; its gift is announced in no local 
paper; it does not add to one’s standing as a citizen. 
Quite the contrary. The defenders of the theory of the 
master State and helot citizen, both Jew and Gentile, 
have often declared the giving of the shekel, the devotion 
to Palestine, to be in the nature of a disloyalty to the 
master State. They have babbled of divided allegiance, 
of psychical expatriation. ‘They have misinterpreted the 
spiritual renaissance in the life of the Jewish people 
which expresses itself in part and only in part in the up- 
building of Eretz Israel. They have met the Zionist with 
the supreme folly of what they take for commonsense. 
If you do not like America, or Germany or England, 
why do you not go to Palestine? No, the moneys that 
have been given to the funds have brought the givers | 
neither credit nor good repute nor conventional praise. 
Few of them can hope to see the land in which their gifts 
are used. They must remain satisfied with the descrip- 
tions of others, with a shadow, with a dream, with a sense 
of some inner urgency, greater than themselves, having 
been expressed. What has been given is very little com- 


pared to what must and shall be given, very little relative 
[ 210] 


WORK AND DREAM 


to what is needed. But in themselves the sums have been 
large; they have increased notably year by year; they 
represent a moral effort invaluable both in itself and as 
an example to all men. 


IV 


More must be given. There were pogroms in War- 
saw and Lodz the other day; Jewish students at the 
Rumanian universities were driven from the lecture halls 
last week. The gates of America are closed; the gates 
of Canada are closing. The ports of Europe are 
_ thronged with refugees. Where shall they go? And 
thirty years of Zionist activity has brought it to pass 
that these fugitives are no longer only fugitives. They 
are pilgrims. They are not only in flight. They have 
a goal. And that goal is the land of Israel. 

The territory delimited by the mandate embraces 
nine thousand square miles. 'The population today con- 
sists of, roughly speaking, seven hundred thousand 
Arabs and Christians, the latter being in a small minor- 
ity, and one hundred and twenty thousand Jews. A 
conservative estimate, borne out by every observer of 
both our agricultural and industrial beginnings, places 
the possible Jewish population of the land without 
Trans-Jordania, at three millions. Immigrants are now 
coming in at the rate of three thousand a month. More, 
far more desire to come and need to come. There are no 
funds wherewith to bring them; there are no lands on 
which to settle them. 

We have been given the moral and political right to 
settle in Palestine. We have been given nothing else. 

[211 ] 


ISRAEL 


Not even the waste lands, the ownerless lands. ‘There 
are no Jewish squatters in Palestine. The swamps and 
the dunes must be bought foot by foot, dunam by dunam. 
One hundred and twenty Arab magnate families control 
sixty per cent of the soil of Palestine. ‘They let huge 
parcels of it lie waste. But we must buy the lands, the 
waste lands. We must capitalize the plans of the emi- 
nent engineer Pinhas Rutenberg to water the lands and 
to turn water power into electricity. We must do every- 
thing with money. Today our holdings are only a little 
over four per cent of the area of the country. It is 
little more than a beginning. 

More must be given. For there is need everywhere. 
The excellent Girls’ Institute for Agricultural and 
Household Arts in Tel-Aviv, let us say, needs twenty- 
five pounds. Not as a gift, not as charity. But as a 
loan to render the superb gardens and the remarkable 
poultry yards more productive and to help the Institute 
to give better food at lower prices in the workers’ kitchen 
which it has organized. So, through a friend in the 
Zionist administration, the Institute pleads for its loan. 
The friend goes to the directorate of the Keren Hayesod 
which is snowed under with expenses and which grants 
the Institute fourteen pounds and fifty piasters. ... 
A humble fact of this kind is more eloquent than a trea- 
tise. The Institute, by the way, does the best it can 
with the smaller sum. ‘The girls work harder, live with 
a sterner frugality. They continue to be superbly 
cheerful and hopeful. 

It is this spirit that pervades the land. It is not one 
of easy optimism. Jews are not given to that, and the 
hardships and difficulties are far too immediate, insistent 

[ 212 ] 


WORK AND DREAM 


and severe. What one finds is rather an indomitable 
confidence that somehow the stars in their courses, the 
energies that shape the historic process, are on the side 
of the land and of our task in the land and of that self- 
recollection on the part of the Jewish people of which 
the upbuilding of the land is both the expression and the 
symbol. 


[ 218 ] 


CHAPTER VII 
VITA NUOVA 


I 


In the villages near Jaffa you meet old men and 
women who still speak Yiddish. In the streets of Tel- 
Aviv fragments of Yiddish and English are heard from 
newcomers. Officials, teachers, physicians can all speak 
English, many of them German, a few French. The 
speech of the Jewish folk in Palestine is Hebrew. In 
colonies and labor-camps, in street and school and hos- 
pital, in offices and factories, in conventions and con- 
gresses there is but one language. Under the British 
Mandate English, Arabic and Hebrew are the three 
official languages of Palestine. Causes are pleaded in 
Hebrew, all public notices are written or printed in 
Hebrew. The Jewish press is a Hebrew press. There 
are simple men and women in Palestine who have half 
forgotten the languages of the dispersion. There are 
thousands of little children who know no language but | 
that of the classics of their race. 

The establishment of Hebrew as the language of the 
Jewish folk in Palestine did not take place without a 
struggle. Nor can it be said to have passed the stage 
of controversy yet. Herzl seems always to have thought 
of the homeland as one of German speech; the great 
masses from the East had a natural tendency to bring 


with them that Yiddish tongue which they had spoken 
[ 214 ] 


VITA NUOUOVA 


for so long and in which a powerful press and a powerful 
literature had long existed. The present situation may 
be said to have been brought about by the coincidence of 
an idealistic argument with some very practical con- 
siderations. 

The idealistic argument was that there could be no 
creative functioning of the Jewish spirit except through 
the language which that spirit had itself brought forth. 
It was asserted quite truly that Hebrew had in fact 
never disappeared as a living tongue and that all that 
was needed was its reapplication to the broader uses of 
life. In the sturdy beginnings of a modern Hebrew 
press, in the works of the poets and novelists of the 
Hebrew renaissance this reapplication had already, in 
a large measure, been accomplished in the dispersion. 
The movement toward Hebrew had, in brief, been spon- 
taneous and inevitable and was bound to culminate in 
the folk-life and literature of those of the dispersed of 
Israel who, returning to Palestine, were ultimately to 
vindicate the creativeness of the Jewish spirit. 

The men who argued thus could point to interesting 
analogies. They could point out the fact that a century 
ago Hungarian was the dying speech of an illiterate 
peasantry which the will of a people has reéstablished as 
that people’s idiom in life and in literature. They could 
point to the revival of several Slavic dialects as the cre- 
ative speech of folk-groups; they could point to the 
phenomena of the Celtic renaissance. Their arguments 
gained practical point and force, as I have said, from 
considerations arising out of the actual life of the people. 
In a kindergarten class of ten it was found that six 
languages were spoken: Yiddish, Spaniol, Russian, 

[ 215 ] 


ISRAEL 


Persian, Bokharan, Arabic. Here was the dispersion 
reappearing in Eretz Israel with a vengeance. It was 
obviously out of the question to make any of these lan- 
guages the unifying element of the group. The children 
all learned Hebrew readily; their parents knew it well 
enough as the language of liturgy and prayer to acquire 
its practical use with ease. In a thousand such ways 
Hebrew won its place as the language of the folk and 

the unifying element. ‘Today we are facing the ac- 
complished fact. Enthusiasts still feel the position of 
Hebrew to be precarious. They are apt to be over- 
zealous in its defense. I do not think that they have 
anything to fear. The arguments for Hebrew are deci- 
sive; the practical needs of life in the country have 
demanded it; the education of the entire present genera- 
tion of children in the language safeguards its future. 

Unhappily there enter into this question intricate con- 
siderations that have nothing to do with either logical 
argument or the immediate exigencies of the practical 
life. ‘The end and aim of Palestine is the creative Jew- 
ish soul. By this idealists do not mean more literary 
men or scientists or thinkers. The diaspora furnishes 
these in great numbers. What is meant is that among 
the hills and in the valleys of Palestine there is to arise 
an autochthonous cultural folk-life in Hebrew from 
which shall issue poets, seers, regenerators of life for 
Israel and for mankind. This is the end of the great 
experiment; this is the high and noble and generous 
vision that has cast its spell upon many of the finest 
spirits of the movement. 

I see life in soberer colors. I distrust that vision 
because I suspect its origin. That origin is romantic; it 

[ 216 | 


VITA NUOVA 


derives from the same sources as the romantic muddle- 
headedness, the false cultivation of the primitive which 
is characteristic of the honest anti-Semite and patriotic 
nationalist in all countries. The primitive epic and the 
folk-lyric are forever charming, forever precious. But 
they grow out of a society and a social consciousness of 
myth and religion and war and barbaric dreams and 
virtues from which humanity must slowly liberate itself 
if human life is to be worth living at all. The famous 
anti-Semitic scholar Adolf Bartels was in his youth a 
lyrist of that exquisite, inimitably magical, volkstiimlich 
kind. Jews do not often write such lyrics. But neither 
do they fan hatred and instigate persecution and delight 
in official murder. Chesterton and Belloc have both 
written beautiful poetry, poetry charged with the flavor 
and myth and lore of their native earth. The literary 
work of Jews is drier or, if you please, harder. It rarely 
has, in any language, the lovely primitive lyric cry, the 
simplicity of the folk-song. It has little primitive 
warmth. It has light. Who has ever heard of a Jewish 
writer or thinker who was a reactionary, who did not 
throw the weight of his talent, critical or creative, on the 
side of liberty, tolerance, peace? Noone. That is our 
glory and our service. The Hebrew idealists have let the 
arguments of the Central European folkists and nation- 
alists get under their skins. We do not want idiot 
geniuses like the late Anton Bruckner; we can dispense 
with the folk-song. Man in this age deserves and needs 
another service. The analytically minded Jewish man 
of letters who everywhere strengthens the hands of the 
liberals, pacifists, rationalists is a better friend not only 
of Israel but of mankind than the most exquisite of folk- 
[217] 


ISRAEL 


poets with the merftality of the romantic soldier, hang- 
man, priest. 

Hebrew is established as the tongue of the land of 
Israel and as the unifying factor of the Jews who live 
in the land. With this inevitable fact it would be foolish 
to quarrel. My criticism is directed against an attitude 
toward that fact which involves dangerous implications. 
The most dangerous of these implications is, in effect, 
a denial instead of an affirmation of our history and 
character, a dream that we shall gain health as a people 
by becoming like other peoples, by reintegrating our- 
selves wholly with earth, myth, legend and thus recover- 
ing the naiveté and the naive creativeness of other folk- 
groups who have never lost that touch with earth, myth, 
speech. In brief, the romantic idealists in Zion plan to 
substitute national assimilation for personal assimila- 
tion. We are to go to Zion and be a folk like other 
folks. Precisely the contrary is to be striven for. We 
go to Zion to be ourselves. The function of those who 
go to Zion is to teach the eternal and necessarily eternal 
masses in the Galuth to be themselves. Self-affirmation 
as a people and as individuals must be our aim. We do 
not desire renationalization in the romantic sense. Shall 
we build up another Hungary, Jugo-Slavia, even an- 
other Denmark—another little folk with another little 
literature practically lost to the central civilization of 
mankind? It is just this sort of thing that as a people 
we have transcended; we have bought that transcendence 
with the blood and sweat and tears of the centuries. Are 
we now to strive to become like the peasants of Galuth in 
the hope that, some day, there may arise among us & 


Bruckner or, at most, a Burns? 
[ 218 | 


Vib ANG OVA 


The practical danger of such a consummation is hap- 
pily small. In Central Europe they have talked about 
the uncreative analytical faculty of the Jewish mind so 
long that sensitive spirits have begun to suspect the 
wholesomeness of the Jewish mind even as that friend of 
mine in America was made uncomfortable by the sound 
of Jewish voices. Quite objectively speaking the Jew- 
ish mind strikes me as being singularly wholesome. Our 
writers and thinkers in all countries are, upon the whole, 
guided by the light of reason and concerned over the 
welfare of mankind. Our men of letters are apt to be 
prematurely on the crest of every new movement. Thus 
fine talents like Ernst Toller and Waldo Frank sacrifice 
significant contour and clarity to brittleness and vague- 
ness. But they are not romantic patriots, warriors, 
myth-mongers. The high average of Jewish mentality 
tends to approach such a type as Bertrand Russell rather 
than such a one as Chesterton. What could be more 
precious or more wholesome? We are the people of 
reason and of peace. That is our glory which we must 
preserve; that constitutes our function among the na- 
tions and our service to mankind. 

I repeat that the practical danger is small. Our 
fundamental tendencies are not likely to change. But 
I should like to see the inevitable establishment of 
Hebrew as the language of Jewish Palestine and its 
rebirth as a living speech everywhere disentangled from 
dangerous analogies and stripped of shoddy dreams. 
When that comes about the Palestinian Jew will be 
bi-lingual or even tri-lingual not only in fact but on 
principle. I was frightened by the many little children 
who could speak Hebrew only. Suppose there is a poet 

[ 219 | 


ISRAEL 


among them? ... The other day a Hungarian friend 
of mine was trying to tell me about Ady, the great 
modern Hungarian poet who died an untimely death a 
few years ago. My friend explained to me that Ady 
used the words of the Hungarian language with such 
freshness and force and connotative richness that his 
diction alone was more thrilling than any music. I could 
well believe it, but it meant nothing to me. There are 
only eight million possible readers of Hungarian in the 
world. Poetry is untranslatable. My friend translated 
for me the substance of a few poems of Ady that the poet 
wrote in Paris and spoke to me of his life. And from 
the translations and the account there came to me the 
unmistakable breath of a terrible forlornness, a crushing 
futility. ... Yet Ady had the consolation that he 
could at least speak to his own people. The Hebrew 
speaking Palestinian will not even have that. However 
much we cultivate Hebrew as a second language and 
accomplishment in the dispersion—and I am heartily in 
favor of such cultivation—the voice of the Hebrew poet 
will never reach even half of his own people as a living 
voice. It will not reach mankind at all.... It is 
imperative that, within a reasonable period, bi-linguality 
become part of Palestinian ideal and practice. | 

There is an even graver reason than any I have 
adduced. Palestine, it must never be forgotten, does not 
exist for itself alone. It exists for itself; it exists for the 
Jewish people everywhere in the world. By the time 
we have brought three millions of Jews to Palestine 
there will probably be almost as many left in the dis- 
persion as there are today. The difficulties of inter- 
communication must be reduced toa minimum. The life 

[ 220 ] 


Ve DANE OV ok 


that streams forth from Palestine must be, in the largest 
possible measure, a life immediately intelligible to great 
masses of the Jewry of the world. Intelligible or, at 
least, accessible. 

Let me not be thought of as harboring any grave 
fears in this matter. The mental and cultural flexi- 
bility which the Jew has acquired through so many gen- 
erations is not likely to be lost through a theory. My 
criticism is directed against the theory which would rob 
us of clear advantages and reduce us, for the sake of 
fancied and romantic goods, to the status of a Near 
Eastern peasant people. That theory is derived from 
sources alien to ourselves, alien to the life of the modern 
world. We are the most modern of peoples; we were 
modern in an immemorial antiquity. The Prophets were 
the conscious destroyers of their national state whenever 
that state became tyrannous. Of romantic patriotism, 
of the doctrine of “my country, right or wrong,” they 
were wholly innocent. They welcomed defeat as cleans- 
ing and captivity as a judgment upon national unright- 
eousness. Folk solidarity for the sake of power, physi- 
cal or cultural, is an ideal that they would not have com- 
prehended. They strove after justice; their Messianic 
state was a realizable commonwealth upon the solid 
earth. ‘They might conceivably have understood both 
H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell. They would have 
been able to make nothing of those romantic notions of 
folk, solidarity, loyalty, which did not arise until the 
heathen, the primitive peoples of the heaths and forests 
of Europe had completely drained Christianity of its 
Jewish content, divorced it from its Jewish origin and 


substituted a new Pantheon of gods for the last of the 
[ 221 ] 


ISRAEL 


Prophets. By all means, then, let Hebrew be the chief 
language of Palestine and let its study spread in the 
dispersion. But let it be a means toward a temperately 
considered end. With medievalizing and romantic no- 
tions of the supreme preciousness of Volkstiimlichkeit 
we have nothing to do. We transcended those notions 
many centuries before they were born. The best minds 
of the modern world are approaching the temper and the 
aims of Jeremiah. To harbor the dreams of the romantic 
nationalist would be for us to submit to the last indignity 
of assimilation, to abandon both ourselves and our 
necessary function among the peoples of the world. 


II 


The question of language is inseparable from that of 
education in Palestine. Under this aspect the problem 
assumes another and acuter form. For it is perfectly 
evident and is, in fact, not denied by anyone, that an 
educational process conducted, wholly in Hebrew is 
bound to result in a narrowing, an isolation, an impover- 
ishment of the mentality of several generations of pupils. 
I do not doubt that the utmost is being done to transfer 
into a Hebrew medium the cultural material upon which 
education is based. It is clear, however, that that utmost 
can be but little for the present, can not be a great deal 
for a considerable period to come. For in such matters 
a voluntary effort, however well conducted and intelli- 
gent, counts for less than those processes of ripening 
and intensification that lie beyond the activity of a con- 
scious will. 

The radical Hebrew idealists admit the character of 

[ 222 | 


VITA NUOVA 


the situation and are ready to accept it. They are will- 
ing to sacrifice the youth of several scholastic genera- 
tions. I am not sure that they are fully aware or ready 
to be at all times fully aware of the magnitude of the 
sacrifice. Not that I accuse them of a want of candor. 
They have simply, in their minds, substituted a world of 
doctrinaire idealism for the world of reality as given. 
In that real world, it is the advantage of the Jew that he 
can master one or several of the Western cultural tradi- 
tions with an astounding intimacy and sympathy and 
yet remain himself. Our idealists are betrayed in their 
reasoning first by the attacks of the philosophical anti- 
Semite or, rather, the pseudo-philosophical anti-Semite 
and, secondly, by the assimilatory Jew whose life repre- 
sents an agreement with the doctrines of that anti- 
Semite. It is a fallacy that race and culture are iden- 
tical. It is a fallacy that varieties within a national 
culture are an evil. If a Jewish man of letters creates 
a style in prose which has an undertone, a rhythmic 
quality demonstrably Jewish, he has in so far enriched 
the human and artistic possibilities of the prose medium 
in which he works. The Provencal strain in French is 
considered no impoverishment nor the Swiss Alemanic 
strain in German nor the Scotch in English. The 
answer that we are more alien, that we are immitigably 
Oriental is fallacious too. We have lived in the West 
now as long as we ever lived in the Kast. We know this 
world and have become a part of it. Our uniqueness is 
due to certain original moral qualities which history has 
preserved and intensified. We are still rebels, destroyers, 
seekers of abstract justice, hostile to the sacredness of 


the state, passionate for a Messianic kingdom on earth. 
[ 223 ] 


ISRAEL 


But that does not make us alien. With this character 
of ours, with these permanent traits we master the cul- 
tures of the West. From that process springs our func- 
tion, service, right. The anti-Semite says: Though you 
speak English or French or German with the tongue of 
men and angels you remain a Jew. ‘The assimilatory 
Jew answers: No, I do not. I have become an English- 
man, Frenchman, German. The Hebrew idealist says: 
You are quite right. We shall cease to speak your 
tongues and shall withdraw from your world. ‘The ra- 
tional answer is: Yes, we remain Jews. As Jews we 
master and possess the cultures of the West; as Jews we 
contribute our best and deepest to those cultures and 
what we contribute belongs to us and also to mankind. 
‘You do not want what we give? You do not want 
us? That is meaningless, for we are here—here through 
forces beyond all human willing, all human arbitrament. 
During the World War you also said you did not want 
the Germans or German civilization upon the earth. 
That is the babble of children. We are here as the Ger- 
mans are here. The world and the universe include us as 
they include all the eternally given elements that are 
a part of its essential character. You have, indeed, tried 
again and again to destroy us. A people cannot be 
destroyed except from within. We are here, part evi- 
dently of the eternal landscape of mortality. We are — 
here neither by your grace nor by our will. Call it the 
will of God . . . call it the nature of things. .. . 
Do I seem to be digressing? The truth is that these 
various questions are inter-coherent. Without the 
Hegelian glorification of the absolute state, without the 


romantic identification of nationalistic race-culture with 
| [ 224 | 


VITA NUOVA 


the integrity of the war-like master State, it would never 
have occurred to anyone to apply racial tests to the par- 
ticipants in any given linguistic culture or to be so irra- 
tional as to think uniformity a good or assimilation a 
necessity. Nor would it ever, by the same token, have 
occurred to the Hebrew idealists to risk de-Huropeaniz- 
ing the educational system of Palestine and producing 
one-hundred-per-cent Jews. Jew and Gentile have been 
ensnared by the same fallacy—the fallacy of the virtue 
of one-hundred-per-centism, impoverishment, exclusion, 
uniformity, mass feeling, action, solidarity. ... 

I do not wish, to use the common phrase, to make my 
criticism a destructive one. I accept Hebrew as the 
chief language of Palestinian Jewry and hence of our 
educational system there. I protest against its exclu-. 
sive dominance, on the ground of the assimilatory char-- 
acter of the theories that support this dominance. Their 
history and character has made the Jews good linguists. 
Let them remain so. They are quick to master a new 
culture. Let them not give up that precious ability. 
Are there not enough cultural nationalists in the world— 
enough Frenchmen who know no literature but their 
own, Englishmen who think German a barbarous Jar- 
gon, Germans who insist that Jesus and Plato and 
Dante must have been of Teutonic blood? 

I shall, of course, be asked for a practical plan. It is 
very simple. I hope to see the educational system of 
Palestine bilingual—Hebrew and English—from the 
kindergarten on. I hope to see German a compulsory 
study in all secondary schools. And I choose German 
rather than French not on account of my own fondness 


for the language and literature, but because nine-tenths 
[ 225 ] 


ISRAEL 


of the intellectual and artistic productivity of modern 
Jewry happens to be embodied in German. A Jew who 
does not know German is not only cut off from an ines- 
timable and congenial source of culture, but from the 
history, literature, philosophy of his own people in the 
period between the emancipation and the present. The 
importance of this consideration transcends all questions 
of partisanship, taste or prejudice. The entire modern 
literature on the history and philosophy of the Jewish 
people is written in German. The history and _ phi- 
losophy of the nationalist and Zionist renaissance is 
written in German. The Palestinian Jew must speak 
and read Hebrew and English; he must read German. 

It will be said that this is a heavy burden. But the 
heaviness of a burden depends upon the strength of the 
bearer. Whoever has come in contact with Jewish life 
in Poland or in the Succession States of Central Europe 
will have no misgiving in this matter. Nor will he fear 
that the Palestinian Jew of the future will be able to use 
no language with native purity, ease and precision. He 
has too often been witness of the contrary. He knows, 
too, that in this matter of the fine and creative use of 
language difficulties have been made on grounds of mere 
theory. They have been declared to exist by those who 
desired them to exist. I have, as it happens, no great 
admiration for the work of Rabindranath Tagore. But 
he seems to me, linguistically, a luminous example of 
what I would have a Palestinian poet of the future be. 
That poet will undoubtedly write chiefly in Hebrew. 
But he should also be able to speak clearly and beauti- 
fully to a larger world. 

The problem or, rather, the dilemma of language is 

[ 226 ] 


VITA NUOVA 


the only one that presses heavily upon the new educa- 
tional system in Palestine. Our schools suffer from 
poverty, of course. The government has so far given 
them no aid. The entire cultural as well as the entire 
colonizatory activity in Palestine is supported by the 
voluntary self-taxation of the Jewish people. The 
thirty-eight kindergartens, the sixty-five elementary 
schools, the three schools of collegiate rank, the teachers’ 
seminaries, the technical schools, the schools of music and 
of art, the libraries, the research institutes of the uni- 
versity—all these institutions of a kind hitherto unheard 
of in this land are, except for the tuition fees collected 
by the schools of secondary and collegiate rank, depend- 
ent for support upon the Jews of the world. ‘Today 
there are twelve thousand pupils and students and five 
hundred teachers. ‘Tomorrow these numbers will have 
doubled. ... Day after tomorrow they will have 
trebled. For here is an activity in Palestine that has 
not, like its economic activities, rigid limits dictated by 
the size and the resources of the land. Jews from all 
parts of the world will send their children here for a year, 
for two years, in order that those children may bring 
back with them into the lands of the world that profound 
sense of their right to be anywhere what indeed they are, 
without which the life of no man can be tolerable, worthy 
or:cleantiaies. 

There is about our schools in Palestine a light that is 
more than the strong sunlight of the land. It is the light 
of a human ease and freedom. The old gray inhibitions 
and fears are gone. I know of nothing more tragic than 
the situation of Jewish pupils and students in nearly all 
the schools of Galuth. Acceptance engenders the fear 

[ 227 | 


-_ 


ISRAEL 


of its ceasing and that fear for the comfort of the present 
begets a shadow of servility. . .. Open exclusion is 
almost healthier. But that, in turn, produces a defen- 
sive arrogance; it produces, too, love and longing that 
are thrown back upon themselves, that grow bitter and 
contorted. For let us have the courage of our essential 
decency. It is not we who harbor instinctive hate or dis- 
like. Our children, uninhibited by words, cries, slights, 
would love the children of the Gentiles. For to us love 
is not dependent on sameness nor brotherhood on uni- 
POrty.s ey te 

From the schools of Palestine these conflicts are gone. 
This old bitterness has never stained them. Speech and 
gesture have lightness, naturalness, clarity... . 

The oldest and most famous of our schools is the 
Herzlia Gymnasium at Tel-Aviv. The handsome white 
building with its arcades stands almost at the center of 
the town. The arcades with their tall round arches are 
the note of the place as they are of the Technicum and 
of the Beth Sefer Reali at Haifa. You stand in those 
arcades and look across the flowers that border them and 
through the tall arches upon the landscape of Palestine. 
And whether the scene be the Mediterranean shore, as at 
Tel-Aviv, or whether it be these strangely sublime hill- 
sides, as at Haifa, you have a presage of the future. A 
presage too vague for the coarseness of words. But 
overwhelmingly definite to the spirit. This architecture, 
this landscape, this ease and freedom in the flooding light 
will mold the youth of Israel. It is no optimist’s dream 
to hope that from these colleges will come men and 
women who will, some day, carry into dark corners of 


the diaspora their own spiritual erectness, their un- 
[ 228 | 


Vi er ae IN GO OOV) A. 


woundedness to the wounded in heart, their natural dig- 
nity to those who cannot find the mean between servility 
and arrogance. 

In the Herzlia Gymnasium the students can elect to 
pursue either a scientific or a literary and philosophical 
curriculum. It is a sign of the abundant health of the 
situation that slightly more than half of the young men 
and women elect to pursue the latter course. Although 
they will probably have to engage in the rudest of prac- 
tical pursuits after graduation, they have the uncon- 
torted instinct for what belongs to a truly human life. 
They thus offer a living argument against the romantic 
extremists who speak of the overdevelopment of the 
Jewish mind and counsel in almost Mid-Western Amer- 
ican terms the cultivation of the hand and a devotion to 
so-called practical studies. 

I do not by any means underestimate the work of the 
magnificent Technicum. I know how necessary it is to 
the building-up of the country. Here again I plead 
against an attitude. A Jewish peasantry like any other 
peasantry, Jewish mechanics like Gentile mechanics— 
what are they to us or to the world? Happily the danger 
of such a development is again slight. The Jewish tiller 
of the earth reads Goethe and Spinoza; graduates of the 
literary course at Herzlia proceed to Mikveh Israel for 
practical training in agriculture; the engineers turned 
out by the Technicum will not be skilled persons with a 
Philistine mind and outlook; the mechanics in the towns 
need books as essentially as they do tools. This is the 
Jand of Israel... . 

I need not dwell on the well-known Bezalel school for 


art and handicrafts at Jerusalem, nor on the schools of 
[ 229 ] 


ISRAEL 


music there and at Haifa nor on the extensive press of 
the land. There is an opera company in Jerusalem; in 
the great hall of the Herzlia Gymnasium we heard a 
quite good piano recital; the flourishing Musical Society 
of Jerusalem invited my wife to give a song-recital 
which was received precisely as it would have been in 
New York or Vienna. Nor need I describe the marvel- 
ous hospitals and stations of the Hadassah Medical 
Service where all the people and races of the land receive 
healing, nor the orphanages in gardens nor the delightful 
children’s republic near Balfouria. Art, the things of 
the mind, the works of humanity are everywhere. F'arm- 
stead and workshop are aware of intellectual values. 
But these are not matters for pride. They are matters 
of course. ‘That they are so is the charter, is the reason 
for the existence of a land of Israel... . 


Til 


My description of the land of Palestine and of the 
people and of the work there has been tentative and 
fragmentary. But it has been so quite consciously. For 
what I have desired to communicate is a vision that I 
saw, an atmosphere that I felt, a hope that is going 
forth, a dream that has been dreamed so long and so 
passionately that it has passed, that it is passing into 
the world of reality. Statistics tell a very vague story 
at best, nor have I a mind for them. In regard to 
Palestine they are, moreover, like the shifting dunes. 
The population increases daily; new colonies are 
founded; the great pilgrimage is on. If the Jewry of 
the West becomes aware of its duty and provides the 

[ 280 | 


VITA NUOVA 


means, the Palestinian jest will soon be a fact: while 
you have turned your back to the country you have lost 
your concrete knowledge of it. So swift is the 
growth. ... 

I must be more definite, however, concerning the 
political foundations upon which our experiment and 
our hope are based. To not a few of my readers what 
I shall now say will be a twice-told tale. But to the 
majority of Americans it will not be so. I am sure that 
there are thousands of thoughtful people, even of Jews, 
in America who have but the vaguest notion of those 
international events and agreements that have trans- 
formed the Zionist aspiration into a historic fact and into 
an unescapable obligation upon the Jewry of the world. 

It was through the meeting of two extraordinary 
minds and characters, those of Chaim Weizmann and 
Arthur James Balfour, that at the end of the World 
War an existing force and trend in human history were 
given an official political existence through the declara- 
tion of one of the great powers. The now famous Bal- 
four Declaration, issued on the second of November, 
1917, is as follows: “His Majesty’s government view 
with favor the establishment in Palestine of a National 
Home for the Jewish People, and will use their best en- 
deavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it 
being clearly understood that nothing shall be done 
which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of 
existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the 
rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any 
country.” 

This declaration was confirmed by the Premiers of 


Great Britain, France and Italy at the San Remo Con- 
[ 231 ] 


ISRAEL 


ference in April, 1920, and later embodied in the treaty 
signed by Turkey and the Allied Powers at Sevres. It 
was a foregone conclusion at San Remo that the Man- 
date for the Government of Palestine should be en- 
trusted to Great Britain. This was in fact done. The 
Council of the League of Nations drew up the Palestine 
Mandate, a document consisting of a preamble and 
twenty-eight articles, which was published at London in 
July, 1922, and deposited in the archives of the League. 
This instrument, then, embodies the pledged views and 
intentions of the Allied Powers and has since been con- 
curred in as fully as possible by the Government and 
the people of the United States. 

It is not necessary to quote or analyze any consider- 
able portions of the Mandate. It will suffice to call 
attention to those provisions that guarantee the Jewish 
settlement of Palestine and those others which are cal- 
culated to allay the fears of people who are tender- 
minded in respect of their “loyalty” to the master State. 

The Mandate of the League of Nations quotes and 
reaffirms the Balfour Declaration. It recognizes the 
“historical connection of the Jewish people with Pales- 
tine,’ as a ground “for reconstituting their National 
home in that country.” It therefore instructs the Man- 
datory Power, Great Britain, to place the country 
“under such political, administrative and economic con- 
ditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish 
National Home.” It directs that the administration of 
Palestine shall without prejudicing the interests of other 
sections of the population, “facilitate Jewish immigra- 
tion under suitable conditions,” and shall “encourage 


settlement by Jews on the land, including state lands 
[ 282 ] 
j 


VITA NUOVA 


and waste lands not required by public purposes.” In 
official confirmation of these provisions, the Mandate 
declares that “English, Arabic and Hebrew shall be the 
official languages of Palestine” and that inscriptions on 
stamps or money if in Arabic shall be repeated in He- 
brew and if in Hebrew shall be repeated in Arabic. 
These statements are unmistakably clear. Whatever 
current of distrust or opposition there may be within the 
countries of the powers constituting the League of 
Nations, there can be no doubt as to the definiteness of 
the pledged word of those powers. 'These powers, 
furthermore, while instructing the Mandatory of Pales- 
tine to give the Jews all reasonable aid and opportunity, 
placed the responsibility for the upbuilding of Palestine 
squarely upon the Jewish people whom they therefore 
implicitly and explicitly recognized as a_ people. 
Hence they provided in the Mandate “that an appro- 
priate Jewish Agency shall be recognized as a public 
body for the purpose of advising and codperating with 
the administration of Palestine in such economic, social 
and other matters as may affect the establishment of the 
Jewish National Home and the interests of the Jewish 
population in Palestine.” Accepting the facts of the 
historic moment, the powers recognized the Zionist Or- 
ganization as such an agency. The Mandate, however, 
adds these important words: “The Zionist Organiza- 
tion in consultation with the British Government shall 
take steps to secure the codperation of all Jews who are 
willing to assist in the establishment of the Jewish 
National Home.” In brief, the Mandate foresaw the 
necessary and proper codperation of the whole of Jewry. 
And in accordance with this provision of the powers the 
[ 233 | 


ISRAEL 


Thirteenth Zionist Congress (Carlsbad, August 1923) 
resolved upon the calling of a Jewish World Congress 
within three years which should provide for the forma- 
tion of a Jewish Agency one half of whose members 
should belong to the ranks of the non-Zionists. The 
Zionist Congress provided, in addition, for the imme- 
diate codperation of all Jews who were in sympathy with 
the upbuilding of Palestine and in substantial agree- 
ment with the terms of the Balfour Declaration and the 
Palestine Mandate. 

I think that these quotations require but little com- 
ment. ‘The recognition of the existence of the Jews as 
a people has always been a part of the correcter instincts 
of mankind. ‘That recognition has now been affirmed 
in a sort of international charter which admits our right 
as members of a people and as upbuilders of Palestine 
to our eivic and political status in the various lands of 
the diaspora. I have no simple faith in treaties or dec- 
larations or in the honor of the essentially belligerent 
and hence still barbaric states of today. But this 
charter, having been given, though it can be partially 
or wholly revoked in action, can never be abrogated in 
moral fact, can never be expunged from the records or 
the memories of men, can never be eliminated from 
among the creative forces of the future. 

It remains to add that this charter of the recognition 
of the existence and the rights of Jewish nationality and 
internationality has been approved and confirmed by 
America too. The sixty-seventh Congress of the 
United States, on September 21, 1922, passed resolu- 
tions embodying and seconding the Balfour Declara- 
tion. In addition the Senate Committee on Foreign 

[ 234 ] 


VT Acie OVA 


Relations has just (March 1925) recommended the 
passage of a bill by which the Government of the United 
States, not being a member of the League of Nations, 
shall express its acceptance of and concurrence with the 
Palestine Mandate and all its provisions. The most 
anxious of conventional patriots need hesitate no longer. 
He may, putting the matter on this lowest plane, admit 
that the Jews are a people and give his contributions to 
the Keren Hayesod. If his nationalist Gentile neighbor 
asks him why, being the member of a people and a friend 
of Palestine, he does not get out of America and go 
there, our anxious patriot can reply that his attitude and 
activity have the pledged support and approval of the 
powers forming the League of Nations as well as of the 
Government of the United States. 

This is perhaps the best place to deal with another 
fancied difficulty which in past years gave rise to the 
long and acrimonious dispute between political and cul- 
tural Zionists. All friends of Palestine are cultural 
Zionists today. ‘They are so because the point of the old 
controversy has been blunted. The concept state has 
lost its rigidity. The Jewish people through its agency 
does in fact administer the government of the Jews in 
Palestine today in all matters that pertain to civilization 
We colonize, educate, sanitate. We deal with all eco- 
nomic problems. We do not exercise the political func- 
tions of the state. But political government has fallen 
into a just disrepute. It has always drifted into war; 1t 
has always destroyed the works of civilization; it is al- 
ways and everywhere tyrant and menace. It is the 
most primitive political thinking that can envisage no 


kind of state except the conventional political state. We 
[ 235 | 


ISRAEL 


are, in fact, building up an organization in Palestine 
which may be called a state or not, as one pleases, but 
which has nothing to do with force. Perhaps this sort 
of organization is the state of the future. Eliminate 
war and it is clear that the state needs, outside of its cul- 
tural and economic activities, only a minimum of police 
power. As the economic life becomes more cooperative 
and less competitive, as is bound to be the case in Pales- 
tine, arbitration will replace litigation. Since Jews are 
in addition, not likely to demand repressive or sump- 
tuary laws or censorships of any kind, it is clear that the 
political activities of this type of state will be so reduced 
as to tend to disappear. By the time there are three 
millions of Jews in Palestine, it is not unlikely that the 
nations may have awakened partially at least from their 
destructive delusions concerning the master State, the 
necessity for force and regimentation, the inevitability 
of armed conflicts. And thus it is possible that then the 
organization we shall have built up in Eretz Israel will, 
in fact, be a state, the state of the future, the state of 
codperation and peace. Meanwhile we shall abstain 
from the exercise of political power, from the ambition 
for it, and rather suffer temporary ills and disappoint- 
ments than question the right and supremacy of the 
British Mandatory. We shall, in brief, set the example 
of a nation that has transcended the desire for power, 
the desire for political rule, that knows the vanity of 
such power and refuses it for reasons akin to those rea- 
sons for which of old Samuel hesitated to place a king 
over Israel. Our position in the whole matter is admi- 
rably clear. We are, by the pledged word of the great 


powers, including the United States, in Palestine as of 
[ 236 ] 


VITA NUOV A 


right. We have the given word of the nations that this 
right shall not interfere with our civic and political rights 
anywhere else in the world. Having as a people out- 
grown the delusions of force and war we shall instinc- 
tively and naturally abstain from any activity which may 
endanger the moral weight of the pledges that have been 
given us. 


IV 


I have said that our position is admirably clear. I 
have not said that it is easy ... There are difficulties, 
problems, dilemmas. We are living in a politically- 
minded world, that world is passing through a period 
of black reaction. Lower depths have been touched 
than were touched in the reactionary period following 
the Napoleonic wars. The Fascisti have just called 
upon the reactionaries and blood-thirsty nationalists of 
the world to unite; they seek a league with the awaken- 
ing Magyars; they stretch out hands to the barbarous 
Poles; they are prevented from fraternizing with the 
Bavarian Hakenkreuzler only through their own incon- 
sistent brutality in South Tyrol. All these parties are 
hotly anti-Semitic, violently opposed to our colonization 
of Palestine. Everywhere the Jew is a liberal, a social- 
ist, a friend of peace. It is easier to attack him than to 
attack the Christian liberal. For against the Jew, one 
has the weapon of calling him alien and therefore traitor 
and enemy of the people. The Jew has no power and 
the weapons against him are ready to hand. In addi- 
tion there are the rivalries of the predatory imperial- 
isms. Italy wants the hegemony of the Mediterranean. 
She grudges the British stronghold in Palestine. 

[ 237 ] 


ISRAEL 


Hence a Fascist Italy, friendly at last with the Vatican, 
causes the outcry over the holy places in Palestine. 
Hence from remote and mysterious sources the Moham- 
medan-Christian Union in Palestine receives encourage- 
ment and funds, and our difficulties with the Arabs are 
increased. : 

The problem of the Arab population is our most 
serious one. Seven hundred thousand Arabs live in 
Palestine. Their rights are clear and indestructible. 
Neither their neglect of the land nor their ignorance nor 
the poverty of the great majority of them nor fanati- 
cism nor disease nor their hostility to what we consider 
progress can diminish their rights by one jot. Whether 
they are a majority in the land as today, or a minority, 
as they will inevitably be tomorrow—their rights and 
our duties remain the same. It is a very hard task that 
confronts us; itis anew task. It is the task of proving 
to the simple Arab peasant that we indeed desire that 
there shall never be either oppressors or oppressed in 
the land, that we will not use our skill or knowledge or 
money against him. And the difficulty of the task 
arises from the fact that the Arab cannot, in the nature 
of things, believe in our sincerity since to him, as to most 
people in the world today, it seems axiomatic that those 
who have power of any sort should use it, that intelligent 
minorities should seek privilege at the expense of the 
many and that popular majorities should seek to oppress 
or to stamp out those who are different from themselves 
and fewer than themselves. The Arab cannot by any 
possibility reach the level of our economic and political 
thinking. Hence even though we pay for every foot 
of land that is bought and though the Arab comes to our 

[ 238 ] 


Widide tee sis WO) Vi Al 


hospitals and clinics, there remains a broad foundation of 
distrust from which, on the slightest provocation, fric- 
tion, instigation from without, there may arise misun- 
derstandings and conflicts. ‘The process of conciliation 
would of course be more rapid if the Arabs and our- 
selves were left untouched by the anti-Jewish influ- 
ences of Europe. For our enrichment of the land, 
which must profit all of its people, is clear enough for the 
simplest to see. Our sanitary engineering, our success- 
ful fight against the fearful curse of trachoma—these 
are things that neither fellah nor effendi can wholly 
disregard. We must make up our minds, however, that 
we cannot escape the sinister influences of the outside 
world and that we must be deterred by no hardship from 
carrying out our duty toward the Arab population with 
perfect patience, serenity and with unfaltering good- 
will. In this matter of the relations of two peoples in 
one land, as in the matter of our gradual organization of 
a cultural, economic, non-political state, we must, the 
opportunity now being ours, resolutely and austerely 
accept our function as seekers and exemplars of a new 
and better order for all the world. 

I do not wish to represent the situation in colors un- 
duly dark. In purely Arab towns and villages one feels 
quite often the breath of a sullen hostility. In many 
parts of the country, on the other hand, the relations 
between Jewish and Arab workers are excellent. Many 
of the Arab notables are hostile to us in a secondary 
fashion only. ‘They miss the profits and privileges of 
Turkish corruption and misrule and include British 
and Jews in a common envy and dislike. Others, on 


the contrary, are fully aware of the advantages of Jewish 
[ 239 ] 


ISRAEL 


colonization to the country as a whole. Thus Ibrahim 
Abdin of Ramleh, one of the leading Arab notables, has 
just issued an appeal to the Arab people in the paper 
Al Akhbar, urging them for their own good to cooper- 
ate as fully as possible with the Jews whose numbers, 
resources, influence and justice bring nothing but good 
to the land. 

Our policy being fixed, what is needed, above all, is an 
intensification of our activity. Neither hostile powers 
from without nor resistance from within can harm our 
work or hope. But we must not fail ourselves. It is 
useless for a Jew to say today: Iamnota Zionist. If 
this work stagnates, if this task fails, if this experiment 
is permitted to be overwhelmed by difficulties, by sloth, 
by niggardliness, the nations who gave us our right in the 
Jand of the fathers will not ask: How many Zionists 
were there? How many non-Zionists? What private 
quarrels, what vain fears, what old self-seeking, what 
ambition of local and transitory Gentile favor impeded 
this creative enterprise? They will not ask these ques- 
tions. ‘They will say: You have not the character 
nor the cohesion nor the dignity nor the strength of a 
people. They will offer us the old dilemma between 
complete assimilation and extinction. Our minority 
rights in Eastern Europe will be a thing of jeers and 
contumely; our people in Central Europe will be driven 
to the ignominy of a false apostasy. Nor let the pros- 
perous merchant or lawyer in Cleveland or Kansas City 
imagine that, if he but gives a little to charity, this mat- 
ter does not touch him. He can close his heart and mind 
to the fate of his people. He cannot protect himself or 


his children from being unescapably involved in that 
[ 240 | 


VITA NUOVA 


fate. The upbuilding of Palestine has become test and 
symbol and decision in the councils of the nations and the 
consciousness of mankind. We shall henceforth either 
be a people, a pacifist and creative people, but a people— 
or else we shall enter a worse than medizval period and 
drag our Jewishness through the world in the guise of a 
secret pestilence and a hidden shame. ‘To avert the lat- 
ter fate, to liberate those in bondage, to guard lest the 
freedom we enjoy in the West do not once more lapse 
into bondage, there is but one means. There is one over- 
whelmingly imperative duty. The work in Palestine 
must be accelerated and intensified. The self-taxation 
of the Jewish people must be doubled or trebled at once. 
American Jewry must save the Jews of the world; it 
will thus help to save all men everywhere from the 
crimes of intolerance, of belligerent nationalism, of 
cruelty and of hate. 


[ 241 ] 


CHAPTER VIII 
THE LAND AND THE WORLD 


I 


In the long run the idea is stronger than the fact. It 
becomes fact. It becomes flesh. By the strength of 
an idea we have sustained ourselves through the ages; by 
virtue of an idea we are regenerating our people and 
contributing to the regeneration of all men. Meanwhile, 
in the fine vernacular phrase, the ground is burning 
under our feet. Not only in Poland and in Hungary, 
but in Rumania and Bulgaria. Once it mattered less, 
for the gates of America were open. But the muddy 
wave of reactionary nationalism has overwhelmed us 
there too. ‘The immigration system by quotas shuts out 
the Jews of Eastern Europe. It shuts them out com- 
pletely. Where shall they go? Canada is surly and 
the tropics are inhospitable. In every harbor of Europe 
as well as notoriously in Cuba thousands of fugitives 
are starving. ‘They have neither home nor refuge; they 
can neither return nor goon. They aredoomed. They 
and thousands of others who will be forced gradually to 
share their fate. Wherever their feet touch the ground 
the ground begins to burn. And their feet have wan- 
dered so long and so far. They have but one hope. 
And the name of that hope is Palestine... 

In this respect then, as in other and even more far- 
reaching ones, it no longer matters whether one is a 

[ 242 ] 


DHE DAN DARN D:D HBr WO RL D 


Zionist or a non-Zionist or an anti-Zionist. One has 
only tobe human. One has no more excuse for not aid- 
ing in the upbuilding of Palestine than one would have 
for not saving one’s neighbor’s children from a burn- 
ing house. ‘That neighbor’s theological or philosophical 
or political opinions would scarcely weigh at such a mo- 
ment. First one would save the children. Every Jew 
must give to Palestine; every liberal and humane Gen- 
tile must plead for Palestine. 

These fugitives in Hamburg and Liverpool and Ha- 
vana, have heard the call. They flee, often in confusion, 
often misled. But the true goal to them is Eretz Israel. 
A pious legend has become a living hope. Dimly they 
feel the vast futility of exchanging one Ghetto for an- 
other. The West complains of their dirt... . Poverty is 
not likely to be clean. The West complains of their 
rigid orthodoxy... . It has been their resistance to op- 
pression. The West complains of their profiteering, 
their black bourses, their dishonest chaffing. . . . For 
centuries they have had no alternative but that of oppos- 
ing’ guile to force. Let them go to Palestine. Their 
children will be clean, enlightened, honest. 

There is a story told in various forms; it is a profound 
illustration of the trend of the saga of the regeneration 
of Israel through Palestine. It is the shabbat. In the 
old town in Jerusalem two tall, old men sit near the 
eurb. They are clothed in their long Polish velvet robes 
and wear the fur-rimmed hats of the seventeenth cen- 
tury. They are speaking in Yiddish. They are droning 
in Yiddish. ‘““When does one begin to be mindful of the 
powers of the rain?’ Rabbi Elieser said: “From the 
first day of Succoth? Rabbi Jehoshua, on the con- 

[ 243 j 


ISRAEL 


99 


trary. ... The old men look up. Two young men 
are passing. Clean-shaven. Khaki trousers. Athletic 
shirts, open at the throat. Bareheaded. They speak 
Hebrew and are discussing the point that Strindberg- 
ian situations, at least, are avoided in the Kvuzoth, 
since the hectic closeness of conventional marriage with 
its nervous exacerbations is impossible there. The two 
young men are smoking although it is some hours from 
the appearance of the first star and the ending of the 
shabbat. . . . The two old men look at each other with a 
grieved bitter glance. They look at those impious 
youths. And with contempt and anger in his voice, one 
graybeard says to the other: “Zionists!’ Then he 
drones on: “Rabbi Jehoshua, on the contrary said: 
Since on the Succoth rain is the sign of a curse...” 

The practical uses of Palestine to the world are, then, 
abundantly clear. The land offers a refuge to those 
Jews whom intolerable persecution drives forth from the 
East of Europe and upon whom the West has shut its 
gates. But it offers a refuge in which the old Ghetto 
conditions are not duplicated in a merely minor form. 
By virtue of conditions both sociological and economic 
the Eastern Jew undergoes a transformation of both 
character and outlook in Palestine. He is not oppressed 
and therefore need not rely on the protection of guile; 
he is not asked to assimilate and hence does not need 
the support of orthodoxy to sustain his integrity. He 
is not endured but is in the land as of right. He is 
driven neither to cheat nor to cringe. He conquers the 
Ghetto for himself and for the world. 

The most anti-national of assimilatory Jews may find 
in these facts sound motives for uniting with their 

[ 244 ] 


THE LAN Dit AN Dy DH Bs WoO RL D 


nationalist friends in the upbuilding of Palestine. They 
cannot get rid of their Jewishness; they cannot crush 
the instinctive integrity of Israel. They are put out 
and embarrassed and shamed by these Jews from the 
East, with their caftans and earlocks and kosher cook- 
ing and petty trading. Let them but help to send these 
people to settlements in Palestine. They will be em- 
barrassed and put out no more. J['reedom is a sover- 
elon remedy. They will not have to apologize to the 
Gentile world for the children who grow up in Pales- 
tine. ‘They will not be shamed by the Palestinians as 
they are by the Poles.... 

It is easy to see, from every point of view, how the 
transformation of the Eastern Ghetto Jew into the free 
and erect Palestinian will tend to clean and heal one of 
the festering wounds of civilization. I am, of course, 
profoundly aware of the coil of tragic injustice in which 
we are involved. It is the Poles and Hungarians to 
whom the missionaries of civilization should be sent. 
It is of them that men should be ashamed, not of the 
Jews whom they have oppressed. But Poland is 
France’s buffer state against the wicked Soviets and our 
Department of State forbids Count Karolyi to plead 
for the liberation of his country at the instigation of the 
emissaries of Horthy’s White Terror. ... Jewish things 
are fashionable in France today. Benoit went to Pal- 
estine to curse and stayed to bless. The new “Revue 
Juive’”’ is published by one of the most distinguished 
of the publishing houses of Paris. But I have not heard 
that the French Government has protested against the 
deliberate starving out of the Jewry of Poland. I have 
not heard of French protests against the Steiger affair 

[ 245 ] 


LS hee 


which so closely recalls that other affair of Captain 
Dreyfus. ... We had better remember the old Talmudic 
saying: “If I am not for myself, who will be? If I 
am for myself alone, what am 1? And if not today 
when?” 


II 


We have not been for ourselves; we have not been 
on our own side. No more idiotic myth was ever in- 
vented than that of the coherence and common activity 
of the Jewry of the world. Jewish money helped crush 
the Russian Revolution of 1905; there is the gravest 
danger today that Jewish money will steady the infam- 
ous Hungarian régime of Horthy. The extremes of 
economic conservatism and economic radicalism have 
coexisted within Jewry, the extremes of nationalism 
and internationalism. ‘There is the division between 
East and West, between the assimilationist and the anti- 
assimilationist, between orthodox and reformed, above 
all, between the passionate adherents of the lands and 
polities of their residence and political allegiance. 
What patriots have we not been—even in old Russia, 
even in new Poland. Landscape and language and 
folkways have captured our hearts again and again. 
Even in Jerusalem today where interaction is faultless 
and the dedication to a common ideal at last complete, 
people in their more intimate social life still tend to 
drift into little English and American and German and 
Russian groups. ... 

We must come home to ourselves. In the diaspora, 
the eternal diaspora, we must come home to ourselves. 


The nations as I have shown, are right in their percep- 
[ 246 | 


DE ES) AON De Ae ee Pika WV OE TD 


tion that we are a people. We have been afraid to be a 
people frankly and openly, because being a people has 
always meant and still unhappily means in most minds 
wanting power and being the foe of other peoples. Our 
history and our present, if we will but use both, prove 
that a people can be a people without power, jealousy, 
hostility, that, in brief, spiritual nationalism of a new 
and prophetic kind can exist.... 

It is here that we come upon the supreme importance 
of Palestine to the Jews of the dispersion and, indeed, 
to the world. All previous great movements within 
Jewry, as all previous movements within the life of all 
other peoples, have been dividing movements. Chassidim 
and Misnagdim were in an opposition that is analogous 
to the opposition between Protestants and Catholics. 
Movements that depend upon either metaphysical or 
economic concepts must divide even while they unite. 
Thoroughly unifying movements within a people have 
hitherto commonly been negative; they have arisen from 
jealousy or fear and have issued in war. The modern 
Jewish renaissance, culminating in the Palestinian task 
is capable of being absolutely unifying; it is absolutely 
pacifistic; it unites the possibility of Jewish cohesion 
with friendliness toward all mankind.... 

I do not say that a cohesion of the Jewry of the world 
crystallizing about the upbuilding of Palestine will solve 
the Jewish problem or silence the anti-Semite. To say 
that would indeed be to state the whole matter loosely 
and inaccurately. For the so-called Jewish problem 
consists in nothing but the uniqueness of our position, in 
the existence of a people which, though without the phys- 
ical possessions and common marks of nationhood, is 
[ 247 ] 


ISRAEL 


still and will always be a people. We do not want, 
then, to solve the Jewish problem. ‘To solve it would 
be to destroy ourselves. We want, on the contrary, to 
affirm it, to affirm the fact that there can be a people 
that is never an enemy of any other people, that is never 
held together by the possession or the hope of power, 
that has, therefore, represented for centuries, and rep- 
resents now, a type of nationalism that may be the hope 
of a barbarous and warlike world. We want to affirm the 
Jewish problem and, by being and remaining emphat- 
ically what we are, transcend the reactionary nationalist 
and anti-Semite everywhere in the world. ... Transcend 
him in our thinking and our action and ally ourselves 
constantly with those forces that in every country are 
struggling to transcend him too. By the constant ex- 
ample of our pacifist and spiritual nationhood we shall 
help to remold the concept nation itself and at last con- 
sciously function correctly and so fulfill our mission 
among the peoples of the earth. 

Our lack of cohesion, our local ardors and patriotisms 
have been not only a betrayal of ourselves but a betrayal 
of our service to mankind. Every Jew who denies or 
belittles his Jewishness and merges himself wholly with 
the people among whom he lives betrays not only his 
own people but all peoples. For there is no secure hope 
for mankind except in peace, except in brotherhood, ex- 
cept in the divorcement of nationalism from power, of 
economic activity from conflict, of the coexistence of 
nations from war.... We have been chosen by the trend 
of history from time immemorial as the example of a 
people of peace, a people without power, a people by the 
force of the spirit alone. .. . It is time now to be for our- 

[ 248 | 





THE LAN DY ANID )T HE WORLD 


selves; it is time for us to know profoundly that being, 
in this sense, for ourselves, we shall also be for all men. 

The upbuilding of Palestine answers, as I have tried 
to show, all the necessities of such a cohesive force as 
this hour in history demands. Every Jew can be 
touched by it on some side. If it appeals to him at first 
as a matter of humanitarian activity, of finding a home 
for the homeless alone, it may yet gradually speak to 
him concerning its subtler issues and help him to affirm 
himself creatively, to reexamine his social and political 
relationships, to learn concerning the possibility of a cul- 
tural state—a new kind of state, the state of the future, 
perhaps, in which the incentives for tyranny and warlike 
solidarity and so for intolerance will be found no more. 
He may begin by giving a shekel for charity and end by 
helping to destroy the political state. He may begin by 
buying a bit of eucalyptus forest and end by literally 
embracing the ideals of the Hebrew prophets from Amus 
to Jesus of Nazareth. 

The whole matter involves something like a conver- 
sion, through experience and the just processes of 
thought, to a view of things that is bound more and more 
to prevail in the modern world. In my personal expe- 
rience the reverse is true. I was a pacifist; I had come 
to see the evils of the political state. I came to the con- 
clusion that it was my Jewishness that had instinctively 
led me to these views. And I came to see that the char- 
acter and history of Israel made it from of old the natu- 
ral representative and bearer of that vision of life. But 
to others who still share, with the majority of people, the 
barbaric view of life—that love must be grounded in 


some hate, that war and competition cannot be tran- 
[ 249 ] 


ISRAEL 


scended as slavery had been or witch-hunting or human 
sacrifice of any kind; to such others a preoccupation 
with the ideas of the history of Israel, with the Pales- 
tinian plan and work; may bring that vision which is also 
the vision of Anatole France and Bertrand Russell and 
of all the clearest minds in all parts of the world... . 

It is not easy to state in specific terms the nature of 
such an inner re-orientation as I have in mind. We live 
from day to day and sometimes from year to year by the 
compromises and instinctive adjustments of our partic- 
ular situation. We try to exclude from consciousness 
the bitter little stings, the disappointments that we feel, 
the recurrent sense of incompleteness, of estrangedness. 
We wonder vaguely at this core of peacelessness in our 
lives. We are not, as a rule, quite happy among Gen- 
tiles. But neither are we so among Jews. Among the 
latter we have an impulse either of flight, or a faint sus- 
picion that our comfort, if we find it there, is bought 
at the price of some unworthiness. We are not often 
_ aware of the fact that our trouble is the result of a fal- 
lacy that is in the very air we breathe, a gross and silly 
superstition. 

The superstition is that solidarity must be confined 
to servants of the same state, the same power-group, 
and that it is the majority of these who have a right to 
set the norms of our outer and even of our inner lives. 
And this superstition has soaked so deeply even into 
our minds because of the coarse and barbaric belief that 
solidarity has but one ultimate aim—the repulsion or ex- 
ertion of force. , | 

But a day comes on which this superstition suddenly 
drops from us. We see that force is altogether evil, 

[ 250 | 


THE LAND AND THE WORLD 


that solidarity in its service is an evil too. There is no 
sound reason why we should be like anyone but ourselves, 
why we should adapt or adjust ourselves. We ask no 
one else todo so. Our social appreciations are not lim- 
ited by the test of uniformity. We do not ask our 
friends of other races to be less themselves in order to 
be our friends. Then why should we ask that of our- 
selves? If all of life were but recruiting for an army, 
that would be a different matter. But it is not. And 
we do an ill service both to ourselves and to our neighbors 
by playing into the hands of the barbarians who, in every 
country, would have all life reduced to that contempti- 
ble level... 

By some such process of reflection we lose our desire 
to be like our Gentile friends and neighbors and we are 
serene if they will not accept us in our unlikeness. And 
at the same time we feel our solidarity with our own 
people to be no longer an offense or a subtle disloyalty 
to other interests. For we know that Jewish solidarity 
is never one that seeks power or exerts force, that it is, 
historically and actually, a solidarity the fruits of which 
are charity and peace. And thus our human and our 
Jewish attitude is no longer negative. It becomes posi- 
tive and fruitful and all our human and social relations 
take on an unwonted dignity and serenity. .. . 

From this point it is but a step toward a rediscovery 
of the history and the literature of Israel—a rediscov- 
ery not so much through study as through the living ex- 
perience of the fact that that history and that literature 
answer profound instincts within our own hearts, that 
the prophets speak our thoughts, that the law-givers 
adumbrated our social tendencies, that so many Jews 

[ 251 | 


ISRAEL 


are followers of Jesus because their blood and his, their 
traditions and his are one. And now there follows, in 
every mind thus liberated, a desire to share in the total 
present fate and larger activity of its people. ‘The cen- 
tral question of Palestine arises and it is seen that Pales- 
tine not only offers a home to our homeless, not only be- 
comes the symbol of our reaffirmation of our right to be 
a people, but offers to all the world the first example of 
a national community that exists, in the old, eternal 
words of Zechariah, not by might, nor by power, but by 
the spirit... . . 


III 


I am not at all blind to the difficulties which the nation- 
alist Jew is likely to meet in the practical world. 'That 
world does not share his notion of nationalism becausé 
it does not, of course, share either his national experi- 
ence nor the character that made the national experience 
what it is. In Hungary all Zionist activity has been 
proscribed on the ground that no Hungarian subject 
must have non-Hungarian interests. There the sub- 
ject is a possible recruit. Nothing else. The state is a 
war machine. Wielders of the bayonet must be in psy-= 
chical uniform, and, if possible, of a uniform stupidity. 
Even in America the nationalist Jew will be accused 
of a subtle disloyalty and may actually be asked what, 
seeing that Great Britain is the Mandatory for Pal- 
estine, he would do in the event of a war between 
England and America. 

So long as the Jew is caught in the same superstition | 
as those who ask such questions he is, of course, helpless. 
He, therefore, has the strongest possible motive for in- 

[ 252 ] 





RHE LAND AN Diet BE owOR LD 


quiring into the nature of the state. He has the strong- 
est possible reason for helping to spread a more civilized 
notion of the state and its rights. He will soon, by 
some study and reflection, come to see that the state of 
the future, the cultural state, the state of peace, will be 
neither prison nor reformatory. The primary right to 
be what one is antecedes citizenship and the exercise of 
that right is consonant with all the duties of citizenship 
except the supposed duty of hating and killing the cit- 
izen of some other state. The mental and moral com- 
plexion of a man who deals honestly and kindly with 
others and pays his taxes, is no one’s business but his 
own. The state has not even the right to inquire what 
other cultural nationalist, religious or ethical interests 
he has. Men do not exist to serve the State; the State 
exists to serve the men. It exists to serve them as they 
are, not as some theory of regimentation would have 
them to be. ‘The best citizen is the worst recruit. An 
actual taste for physical combat is a remnant of the brute 
in man and the assimilatory Jew’s self-protective mim- 
icry of it is the last of human degradations. His 
incomparable fortitude under persecution renders the 
reproach of cowardice—a foolish reproach, by the way— 
absurd. He isa pacifist by history and instinct. And 
since the free and cultural state of the future cannot 
coexist with war, it is his duty both to himself and to 
others to help the hope and work for that state to pre- 
vail. It is such a state that he is founding in Palestine. 
It is only in such states in the diaspora that his future 
as well as the future of all men, can be tolerable. He 
must proceed in all his actions and attitudes from ab- 


solute, pacifist foundations. ‘The temporary obloquy 
[2538 | 


ISRAEL 


and contempt that he will suffer from the mob he will 
share with the noblest minds among all peoples, with 
Jeremiah and Jesus among his own. 

I do not wish to labor any point unduly. But this 
one is of supreme importance. I have described in a 
previous chapter the rise and fall of violent anti-Semi- 
tism and have shown how it coincides with the rise and 
fall of war-like emotion. The nations, at the deepest 
core of popular consciousness, think of themselves still 
as embattled tribes. Hence their instinctive impulse 
alternately to use and to extrude the Jewish minorities 
in their midst. There is no remedy for this situation 
so long as nationalism is identified with solidarity for 
economic warfare or the more open warfare of poison- 
gas and machine-guns. ‘The Jews of the diaspora can- 
not be emancipated until the nations are emancipated 
from their darkest sins and superstitions. The extent 
and violence of anti-Semitism in a given state is a test 
of that state’s relation to any rational concept of hu- 
mane civilization. The salvation of Israel and the sal- 
vation of mankind are one. Hence, the duty of the Jew 
to himself as well as to his Gentile fellowmen is over- 
whelmingly clear: to be as a Jew always on the side of 
the oppressed and disinherited, to be unfalteringly in 
league with those who work for peace anywhere in the 
world, to give and expect no return, to resist war and 
the call to war and the propaganda of war to the utter- 
most, to do all this as a normal self-expression of his 
Jewishness, to build up in Palestine a state that abstains 


from power, that knows nothing of rivalry, that will 


suffer injustice rather than seek to share political re- 
[ 254 | 


ie ee AGNI AGN Dirks WO RTD 


sponsibility, a state that shall not only restore the pre- 
served of Israel but be a light to the Gentiles. 

In assuming this task and the moral attitude which 
it entails the Jew can exchange his present attitude of 
self-obliteration for one of self-expression. He can be 
at once much humbler and much prouder. His lack of 
psychical balance comes from his often enforced but 
quite unnecessary and always futile flight from himself. 
He is by nature and tradition a sharer in moral revo- 
Jutions, a builder of some Messianic kingdom upon 
earth. He has but to be true to himself and the central] 
ideals of his people. 

The deep wrong of assimilation is a wrong the Jew 
does not only to himself but to all men. The Talmud 
tells the story how on that day on which the Egyptians 
were overwhelmed by the Red Sea, the great angels 
about the throne of God prepared to intone their song 
of praise. But God silenced them. “The work of my 
hands is drowning in the sea and you would sing a song 
of praise?” And to this day on the traditional anni- 
versary of the destruction of the Egyptians the Jewish 
liturgy dispenses with the great song of praise. . . . To 
the inheritor of such a tradition it should be clear that 
he has no place among those who hate and fight. 

It is perhaps here that the whole question of assim- 
ilation can be finally clarified. ‘The anti-assimilationist 
does not mean, as has been foolishly supposed, that we 
are to sunder our relations with Western culture, that 
we are to cease to possess it or to cease to share in its 
creative activities. He means that we are to cease be- 
cause of false shame to share in the barbarism of the 
world which our remote ancestors had transcended. I 

[ 255 ] 


ISRAEL 


have been told the story of a Jewish student at West 
Point who, in anticipation of gibes and slights, made 
himself the best boxer of his class. This story illustrates 
the lowest depth of the assimilatory process. What busi- 
ness had a Jew at a war-college? He betrayed his 
people; he betrayed civilization. If he thirsted for con- 
flict and self-immolation, was there not somewhere in 
the world a movement of passive resistance to be or- 
ganized or led? Were there none unjustly imprisoned, 
none oppressed? Was there no pestilence-stricken wil- 
derness anywhere where men needed the help of the 
unafraid? In that lad’s life every Jewish instinct had 
been warped; from his mind every Jewish thought had 
been driven. He was proud to be tolerated at West 
Point. He should have been too proud to be there at 
all. He had never been taught the verses of our eternal 
Psalms: Some trust in chariots, and some in horses, but 
we will make mention of the name of Jehovah our 
God... . 

It is easy to multiply examples of assimilation in the 
evil and servile sense. ‘There are Jewish fraternities at 
our colleges that without any inner urgency ape the 
habits and methods of Gentile fraternities; there are 
Jewish fraternities at European universities that have 
gone so far as to imitate the barbarous stupidity of 
dueling. There are private schools all over the country 
that are attended exclusively by Jewish pupils. They 
have Christian names and cultivate a superficially Chris- 
tian atmosphere and are patriotic and stopped teaching 
German during the war. There is no course in the 
Torah or the prophets or the tragic and glorious history 
of Israel. It is evil and servile assimilationism that 

[ 256 | 


THE LAND AND THE WORLD 


does not build a Jewish university in every country 
where we are not made thoroughly welcome at Gentile 


universities ... made welcome as we are... not because 
we assume the protective coloring of being keen on 
competitive sports or careless of study ... we, the 


people of the book, to whom learning has been as the 
breath of life... . 

Evil and servile assimilationism, in brief, is doing 
anything that is a contradiction of our fundamental 
Jewish instincts. The process has often gone so far 
that the man no longer knows what ails him. He is 
conscious of nothing but a vague spiritual discomfort. 
Let him talk to nationalist Jews; let him read the sacred 
books once more quite simply and as the documents of 
a human people and their human story. He will come 
home to himself and to his people and he will find the 
ideals of their history at one with the profoundest moni- 
tions of his own soul. ... I have come to the conclusion 
that the orthodox Jew who is enmeshed in a web of 
intellectually indefensible formalism is a more dignified 
and hopeful human phenomenon than the emancipated 
and shame-faced Jew whose whole existence is one long 
rite of propitiatory imitativeness. We who desire that 
all men should be free and at peace, let us at last exer- 
cise the first and most necessary of human liberties: let 
us be ourselves; let us be Jews. ... 

Our flight is in any event so futile. And I have ob- 
served with a somewhat bitter amusement how in our 
flight, though we never gain anything, we lose certain 
obvious and proper advantages. In America, for in- 
stance, and in Central Europe, the countries I know 
best, the Jews are, out of all proportion to their num: 

[ 257] 


ISRAEL 


bers, the supporters of music, of art, the audience of 
the best poets and novelists, the supporters of liberal 
and humane causes. .. . Well, these are all Jewish 
matters. Art and liberty are proper and instinctive and 
old Jewish preoccupations; charity and learning are 
the chief aims of the entire religious system of the 
Jew. ... We deserve no credit for these things, no 
personal credit. .. . But we should know with a calm 
and steady knowledge the qualities and tendencies of 
our character as a people. We must not brag; we 
need not whisper. There is far too much whispering. 
.. . self-criticism is one thing, shamefacedness is an- 
other. We must expel from blood and brain the most 
terrible of all the results of our long persecution—a 
shadow of our persecutor’s estimate of us. Not our 
greatest have quite escaped this curse. Wassermann re- 
grets that in every Jewish family that has been able 
to rise above the care for daily bread there is an artist. 
... A subtle anti-Semitism has stolen into his mind.... 
Perhaps these aptitudes and energies could be more 
fruitfully employed than in writing novels and poems 
and symphonies that commonly miss true excellence. ... 
But those aptitudes and energies are in themselves beau- 
tiful and admirable... . There was a Zaddie who asked 
that there be inscribed upon his tomb neither name nor 
date but only this legend: “One who loved Israel.” ... 


IV 


What have I in mind? A Jew. A man first and a 
Jew afterwards. But profoundly a Jew for the sake 


of men. One such I have known. He never ceased for 
[ 258 | 


CRE. LAN DAN Dt THE WORLD 


a moment to be a Jew because he contributed richly 
and memorably to the particular Aryan civilization in 
which his lot was cast. But he knew without reflection, 
he knew through a deep inner monition that his contribu- 
tion should be high and fine and cleansed of dross be- 
cause he was a Jew. No, not to repel anti-Semitic re- 
proaches. But out of a positive dignity and fineness 
that became him as a son of so many martyrs and proph- 
ets. He evaded all strife. He preferred to suffer 
grave disadvantages and also petty annoyances rather 
than engage in strife. . . . On a snowy winter night, 
coming out of a crowded theater, he refused quietly to 
join in the scramble for the few available taxicabs. 
There might have been controversy. There might have 
been an ugly word from a pushing or ill-tempered per- 
son. And my friend who is, physically too, the noblest 
and most dignified of men, used the slow and rather 
dilapidated tramway of his city. . . . Nothing about 
him touched me more deeply than this incident. . . . It 
was a Jewish trait he showed. For many a pushing 
and jostling Jew pushes and jostles to override that 
impulse in himself. Why does he strive to override it? 
Because the Gentiles have taunted him with cowardice 
and servility and he desires to show that he is as good 
a man as anyone and can guard his interests as well as 
anyone else. But the attitude and gesture do not suit 
him, do not sit well upon him and he becomes offensive 
and vulgar. . . . Like the Gaels of old when we fare 
forth to battle we always fall. Our victories are of 
another kind... . 

It is not easy to be a Jew. It will be easier when the 
Jew is content to be himself. He must listen to his 

[ 259 | 


ISRAEL 


own soul. It is futile for him to try to cultivate the 
chivalric virtues—love of combat, uncritical acceptance 
of standardized objects of loyalty, an artificial sense of 
honor, an acceptance of life as a game to be played 
according to rules. The Aryan gentleman asks con- 
cerning an action: Is it honorable according to a code? 
Is it correct? Is it gentlemanly? Is it “quite cricket’’? 
The Jewish gentleman asks: Is it righteous? What is 
its relation to an eternal justice, to an eternal mercy? 
It is perfectly true that, according to the standards of 
chivalric Europe and the analogous tradition in Amer- 
ica, the Jew is no gentleman. How could he be? Why 
should he strive to be? He cannot say, for instance, 
“my country, right or wrong.” His historic experiences 
are not rooted in the Germanic institutions of nobles 
and retainers, of fealty as an abstract virtue. He missed 
not only by actual exclusion but as a matter of char- 
acter and instinct the whole experience of the feudal 
world. As a romantic curiosity he can appreciate the 
devotion of Aryan gentlemen to a royal nonentity, to the 
mediocre occupant of an exalted office. Personally he 
can never share these emotions. His democracy, his 
passion for reasoned justice, are bone-deep and thou- 
sands of years old. In the moral world he does not 
understand compromise. When the great oppressed 
the humble the prophets of Israel sought to destroy the 
state even unto obliteration, even unto foreign cap- 
tivity. The Jew has not changed. It was inevitable 
that modern socialism should be largely the creation 
of Jews. It does not matter whether the precise doc- | 

1IT am aware of the coincidence of these ideas with those so eloquently 


expressed by my friend Maurice Samuel. 
[ 260 ] 





THE LAND AND THE WORLD 


trines of any group of them are likely to prevail. They 
acted out of an immemorial and unchangeable Jewish 
instinct. “He judged the cause of the poor and needy; 
then it was well. Was not this to know me? saith 
Jehovah.” 

Thus the Jew finds himself spiritually in conflict with 
his environment and, being the weaker, being the mem- 
ber of a persecuted minority, he becomes a servile as- 
similationist in his attempt to establish a harmony be- 
tween himself and his environment. The Jew of the 
future will understand both himself and the world bet- 
ter. That world cannot be saved, cannot be redeemed 
from chaos except through codperation and peace. 
Liberals and pacifists and the truly ethically minded 
see that. They know that the chivalric instincts must 
fall into disuse, that the gallant barbarisms of the North 
will end by destroying civilization unless they are curbed. 
Men must return to the ideals which Jesus derived from 
the prophets and teachers of his people. The world 
must be Christianized, the world must be Judaized. 
The two are one... . 

The Jew who sees these truths, who strives to build 
the state of peace and justice first in Palestine, next 
to codperate with all men who seek to build it else- 
where—that Jew will be calmly and serenely himself. 
Being a Jew is what he owes mankind. It may be that 
he will fail. It may be that all those thousands of fine 
and erect spirits among the Gentiles who are at one 
with him will fail. It may be that the black reaction 
now upon the world will issue in other wars and catas- 
trophes that will overwhelm the great civilizations of 
the West. It may be. . . . Then at least we shall have 

[ 261 | 


ISRAEL 


been among the least guilty; we shall have tried; we 
shall have clung to the saving doctrines of our people. 
With Elijah and Amos, with Jeremiah and Jesus we 
shall have stood unafraid before the powers of earth, 
we shall have loved the sojourner and judged right- 
eously between a man and his brother; we shall not have 
brought vain oblations to the idols of the marketplace; 
we shall have striven that violence shall no more be 
heard in the land, nor desolation nor destruction within 
its borders, but that its walls shall be called salvation 
and its gates praise. 


[ 262 | 


CHAPTER IX 
PROGRAM 


I 


Among the ill-known books of the world are the 
Hebrew scriptures. Protestants read them with the- 
ological preoccupation; they interpret them in the light 
of anterior assumptions that have nothing to do with 
that body of literature or with the character of the peo- 
ple who produced it. Orthodox Jews equally fettered 
by the theory of literal inspiration quibble over the in- 
terpretation of rules and laws. The modern Jew rarely 
reads the Hebrew books at all. He may, in fact, be 
repelled by the traces of an early and barbaric age that 
are found in certain of the most ancient legends; he may 
also be faintly disturbed by the use which hostile Gen- 
tiles have made of many passages in both the Torah and 
the prophetic books. The civilization in which he lives 
is more or less permeated with the spirit of these hostile 
interpretations. For himnself, then, this modern Jew 
prefers the liberal and radical philosophies of Christen- 
dom, the scriptures of the Greeks, even of the Hindus. 

He is, however free he may be in his own mind, 
hampered and inhibited by the false analogy to which I 
have called attention in a previous chapter. The books 
of the old Testament are not to us what the gospels 
are to the Christians. Jews and Judaized Gentiles went 


forth into the world and preached a new religion. The 
| 268 | 


ISRAEL 


peoples of Europe accepted this new religion in super- 
ficial speech and gesture. In fact they transformed it 
into the image of their immemorial selves. They have 
been and are pagan. The pacifists, the non-resisters, 
the absolute democrats are men and women who, by 
virtue of an innate difference of vision, have found 
Christianity, the original and completely Jewish teach- 
ing of Jesus, necessary to the health of their souls, to 
what they conceive to be the salvation of men on earth. 
And if we look about in the world we see that such men 
and women are always closely allied with Jews by bonds 
of common effort and of personal sympathy. 

The Jew should remember that the Hebrew scrip- 
tures are the expression of his people’s national self. 
Historic or scientific exactness has nothing more to do 
with this matter than it has with the Greeks’ relation 
to Homer or Plato, with that of the Germanic peoples 
to the Nibelungenlied or to Beowulf, with that of 
medieval Europe to Dante. Each of these documents 
embodies the human and ethical ideals that have 
sprung from the character of the people that gave it 
birth. iach is, in a deep sense, an unerring guide to 
the nature of that people. The Hebrew scriptures are 
our epics, songs, the expression of our profoundest moral 
leanings, of our reactions to man and nature and human 
life. ‘The traces of early and barbaric ideals need bother 
us no more than they troubled the author of the Re- 
public in Homer or than they do a humane and high- 
minded British imperialist in Beowulf. Each still found 
and finds himself fundamentally expressed in the epics 
of his race. 


This matter was very simply and strikingly illustrated 
[ 264 | 


PROGRAM 


by an incident that happened during the World War. 
When it was apparent that America was about to join 
forces with the Allies, a very admirable German friend 
living in America sent me a poem which he had written | 
in the Nibelungen stanza. In very moving terms he 
described the tragic conflict of loyalties that his fellow 
German-Americans were soon likely to face and com- 
pared that conflict to an analogous conflict of loyalties 
that is described in the epic of his race. I sympathized 
intensely with the difficulties of my German-American 
friends. But their conflict of loyalties meant nothing 
to me. I wanted to know on which side in that great 
conflict there was a preponderance of justice. If there 
was none on either side I was prepared to sympathize 
with the defeated, with the humiliated, and with the 
victors only in so far as they used their victory with 
restraint, with magnanimity, with justice, with mercy. 
Justice and mercy and peace have the allegiance of the 
Jew. Of loyalty irrespective of ethical values he knows 
little. Human and cultural sympathies may indeed 
cause him to see justice and mercy and peace where they 
are far to seek. But it is these that he wants as the 
objects of his loyalty. ... 

The legend by which this Jewish allegiance to justice 
and mercy, this Jewish carelessness of power, of any 
claims save those of justice and mercy, are illustrated 
is always the same. It begins to take form in the very 
ancient story of Elijah. Ahab the king desired the 
vineyard of a certain man Naboth who dwelt in the 
valley of Jezreel. But Naboth was unwilling to give 
up even to the king the inheritance of his fathers. So 
Jezebel, the queen, suborned false witnesses who swore 

[ 265 ] 


ISRAEL 


that Naboth had been guilty of blasphemy and the man 
was stoned to death. It is remarkable enough that in an 
ancient oriental monarchy the king had to barter with 
a plain farmer; it is remarkable that the man had to be 
declared guilty of an ethical offense. At this point, 
however, he who should really be called the eternal Jew 
enters the story. Elijah the Tishbite went to the king. 
“In the place where dogs licked the blood of Naboth 
shall dogs lick thy blood—even thine.” And Ahab, in- 
stead of having the prophet put to the sword, cried: 
“Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?” and rent his 
clothes, and put sackcloth upon his flesh and fasted... . 

A humbler man than Elijah was Amos. He was a 
herdsman of Tekoa, a dresser of sycamore trees. With 
wild and passionate energy he denounced the corrup- 
tion, the luxury, the oppression of the rulers of the 
political state. The priests, supporters of the existing 
order by which they profited, warned King Jeroboam: 
“Amos hath conspired against thee in the midst of the 
house of Israel... .”’ It is the earliest version of the 
story of Ibsen’s Dr. Stockmann, the “enemy of the peo- 
ple’. . .. It is the enduring story of the friend of 
mankind... . 

Profounder than either of these stories is the story 
of Jeremiah. The king of Babylon’s army was fighting 
against Jerusalem. The little Jewish kingdom in the 
corridor between two vast monarchies was about to be 
wiped out. The national existence of the Jews was in 
deadly peril. Was this not a time for loyalty, for 
solidarity, for active patriotism? Not to the eternal 
Jew. It was in this hour that Jeremiah spoke unto 


Zedekiah, king of Judah in Jerusalem. He spoke of op- 
[ 266 ] 


PROGRAM 


pression, of wrong, of injustice. He was accused—how 
familiar that sounds—of “falling away to the Chal- 
deans.’ Prototype of the pacifist, the seeker for justice 
amid our human confusions and false loyalties, of the 
pro-German in the camps of the Allies, of the pro-Ally 


in the citadels of Central Europe. . . . The destroyer 
of “morale,” of the mere heathen will toward resistance, 
toward victory ... the “defeatist’’ of the ages.... 


Naturally the “princes said unto the king: Let this man, 
we pray thee, be put to death; for as much as he weaken- 
eth the hands of the men of war, in speaking such words 
unto them: for this man seeketh not the welfare of this 
people but the hurt.” And they cast Jeremiah into a 
dungeon in which there was no water but only mire, as 
they have been casting him ever since—once in the court 
of the guard in Jerusalem in the sixth century before 
Christ, later in Leavenworth and Aleatraz.... 

The same Jewish legend, gathering in the Hellenized 
Roman empire about Jesus, the carpenter’s son of 
Nazareth, a humble man like Amos and like him a 
pacifist and a friend of the oppressed, swept through 
the heathen world. But powers and principalities made 
that legend their own, stripped it of its Jewish meaning 
and built about it religions of pagan festival and joy 
in battle. The Jewish people, driven from its land, 
despised, cast out, unfriended as the individual prophets 
had been, assumed unconsciously or consciously the 
part of prophet, denouncer, resister, herald of peace in 
the world of the battling nations and became a thorn in 
the side, an ache in the conscience of mankind... . 
Among Slavic communists in the East and Nordic re- 
actionaries in the West there are two common objects 

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of hatred and contempt today: the religion of Jesus and 
the folk from which Jesus sprang. ... 


II 


The Prophets in Israel never stood quite alone. 
Among the people as a whole there had developed from 
early times on notions quite at variance with any that 
were entertained either by their contemporaries in the 
ancient East or by later peoples untouched by the Jew- 
ish teachings of Jesus. Thus the purchase of a slave 
entitled the master to but six years of the man’s service. 
In the seventh year the slave was set free. If the slave 
desired voluntarily to remain, his ear was pierced with 
an awl. Why? asked the later sages of the Talmud. 
Because that ear too had heard the great message that 
came from Horeb concerning a covenant with the Eter- 
nal and yet the man’s slavish spirit wanted no free- 
MOMs iie8 | 

The law had regard for the poor. Here and not 
in the slave-supported oligarchies of Greece are the be- 
ginnings of democracy in the modern, humanitarian 
sense. The tillers of the land were commanded not to 
reap the corners of the fields nor to glean after the 
reaping nor to gather the fallen fruit. All this was for 
the poor. In every seventh year, moreover, the owners 
of farms and vineyards and oliveyards were commanded 
to turn over their lands to the poor, the landless. ‘The 
taking of interest was forbidden within Israel and 
pledges of fundamental necessity had to be returned 
whether the loan was paid or not. In every fiftieth 
year, moreover, in the great year of the jubilee, liberty 

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was to be proclaimed throughout the land and every 
man was to be returned unto his original possession. 
Hence it was impossible, as the law distinctly states, 
for land to be held in perpetuity and purchase was 
equivalent to a leasehold of half a century. Mortgaged 
lands were to be returned to the original owners in the 
year of the jubilee; properties within walled cities if 
not redeemed by the seller within a year became the 
permanent property of the purchaser. But houses in 
unwalled villages were considered as part of the fields. 
They could be redeemed at any time and possession of 
them ceased in the year of the jubilee. 

It is curious how attention among both Jews and 
Gentiles has always been fastened upon the dietary regu- 
lations of the Torah and never upon its social and eco- 
nomic laws, which both in spirit and in fact are two full 
millenniums ahead of the latest possible date that can 
be assigned to the documents in question. In view of the 
position of the Jews in the dispersion it is equally curious 
that no more weight has been attached to the extraordi- 
nary liberality of the laws of the Jewish state in regard 
to the stranger in Israel. The law reiterates nothing 
quite so often as the equality that must obtain between 
the sojourner and the native-born. ‘A sojourner shalt 
thou not wrong, neither shalt thou oppress him... . 
Judge righteously between a man and his brother and 
the sojourner that is with him. . . . Love ye therefore 
the sojourner, for ye were sojourners in the land of 
Egypt. . .. Ye shall have one manner of law, as well 
for the sojourner as for the home-born. ... Ye shall 
have one law for him that doeth aught unwittingly, for 


him that is home-born among the children of Israel, and 
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for the stranger that sojourneth among them.”’ There 
are here, be it observed, no regulations that the so- 
journer shall acquire citizenship or embrace a state re- 
ligion or sacrifice to a new god. Justice and mercy and 
love are to be his because he is a fellow-man. It is the 
Torah that announces the even more revolutionary com- 
mand: “Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; ye 
shall hear the small and the great alike; ye shall not be 
afraid of the face of man.” | 

Of the utmost social and psychological significance 
are the regulations in regard to military service. The 
officers shall examine the men who make up the army 
and before any battle is joined they are to exempt those 
who have built a new house and have not dedicated it, 
those who have planted vineyards and have not reaped 
the fruit, those who are betrothed to a maiden and have 
not taken her to wife, and him who is “fearful and faint- 
hearted,” “‘lest his brethren’s heart melt as his heart.” 
There is no word of contempt for him who is by nature 
averse to slaughter. ‘There was no spear at the back 
of the Jewish soldier to make him face the spear of the 
enemy. 

It is perfectly clear, of course, both from the nature 
of mankind and from the history of Israel that these 
various economic and moral laws were never perfectly 
enforced. ‘The Jewish state was probably not very dif- 
ferent from any other. Except in this vital respect— 
that it was a state with a troubled conscience and a 
divided soul, that rich men and princes and kings did 
in very truth quake before the Prophets, who opposed — 
to their power and rapacity the humane and merciful 
law. It is a return to this law that Prophet after 

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PROGRAM 


Prophet demanded. And the Prophets literally pre- 
ferred foreign captivity and the extinction of national 
power to disobedience to that law which differentiated 
Israel from all the other families of mankind. 

Even before the age of the Prophets there was in 
Israel a presage of the evils of power, of the fact that 
power would lead to apostasy and a neglect of the law. 
Whether the stories are historic memories or character- 
istic legends makes little difference in regard to their 
significance. The legend of Gideon, for instance, bears 
internal evidence of proceeding from a very: remote and 
still barbaric period. A wild flame dances in it, strange 
and primordial. Yet when the men of Israel offered 
the chieftain hereditary rule over them, he refused. “TI 
will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over 
you: Jehovah shall rule over you.” And the ancient 
chronicler of these events weaves into his narratives 
(Judges, ix, 8-15) a fable of extraordinary depth and 
beauty. The trees were going to anoint a king over 
them. The olive refused to leave her fatness for a 
barren waving to and fro over the other trees and the 
fig refused to leave her sweetness and the vine her 
fruit which cheereth God and man. But the barren 
thorn accepted the offer and became king... . 

Better known is the story of how the elders of Israel 
came to Samuel and said: “Now make us a king to 
judge us like all the nations.” Samuel warned them. 
He told them that a king would conscript their sons and 
their work, both life and property, that his luxury 
would beget rapacity, and that they would cry out and 
ery in vain against the tyranny of the king. They did 
not listen to him. The old pathetic assimilatory cry 

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ISRAEL 


arose even then—the cry of the radical Zionist of yes- 
terday: “Nay, but we will have a king over us that we 
also may be like all the nations. . . .” 

So Israel tried to be like all the nations. For a brief 
period the little kingdom attained power and a shadow 
of splendor. But the temporal splendor faded in the 
dusk of unhappy battles, and the Prophet arose to 
protest against the fruits of power which are injustice 
and oppression. And, from the days of the Babylonian 
Captivity on, Israel became a people and remained a 
people more through the force of an idea, a dream, an 
aspiration, than through any foothold it had upon the 
solid earth.... 


III 


An idea, a dream, an aspiration. .. . 

First concerning the worthiness of being merely 
human. The Talmudists declare that the deepest mean- 
ing of the Torah is in the plain statement: “These are 
the generations of Adam.” All men are said to be the 
descendants of one for the sake of the peace of God’s 
creatures. No man can say to his neighbor: My father 
is a greater than thine. None must. “The rich and the 
poor meet together; Jehovah is the maker of them all.” 
In the Messianic state “the fool shall no more be called 
noble, nor the churl said to be bountiful.” Israel 
acknowledges no rank but that of man. “Seek not after 
fame,” writes the Talmudist, “nor after honor. Lust not 
after the table of princes. For thy table and thy crown 
are above theirs.” | 

Thence arises the passion of the Prophets and the 
passion of Israel for social justice. “They have sold 

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PROGRAM 


the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes. 
. . » Lhey know not to do right who store up violence 
and robbery in their palaces. . . . Ye who turn justice 
to wormwood, and cast down righteousness to the earth, 
seek him that maketh the Pleiades and Orion and 
turneth the shadow of death into morning.” Isaiah is 
at one with Amos: “Thy princes are rebellious and 
companions of thieves; everyone loveth bribes and 
followeth after rewards; they judge not the fatherless, 
neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them. 
... The spoil of the poor is in your houses; what mean 
ye that ye crush my people and grind the face of the 
poor? ... He looked for justice but, behold, op- 
pression; for righteousness but, behold, a cry.” 
Jeremiah takes up that eternal burden: “They plead not 
the cause, the cause of the fatherless, and the right of 
the needy they do not judge.” Hosea sums up its 
essence: “Jehovah hath a controversy with the in- 
habitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor good- 
ness nor knowledge of God in the land.” The venge- 
ance of God is called down on him only who “re- 
membered not to show kindness, but persecuted the poor 
and needy man, and the broken in heart.” 

The words of the Prophets are read in churches and 
they are admired. But to the Jew they have a fiery 
reality. He need never have read them. He may be 
false to their teaching in every action of his life. He 
knows concerning them from within. He knows his 
apostasy when he commits it. He recognizes their un- 
escapable force so soon as he comes upon them. ‘Thence 


derive the charitable gifts of the grimiest and thence the 
[ 278 | 


ISRAEL 


social revolutionary tendencies of the most alienated 
from the immediate traditions of Israel. . . 

Unfaltering are those traditions. “If thine enemy 
be hungry, give him bread to eat: and if he be thirsty, 
give him water to drink. . . The merciful man doeth 
good to his own soul; but he that is cruel troubleth his 
own flesh. . . . By mercy and truth iniquity is atoned 
for.” From the most ancient sources are drawn those 
interpretative precepts of the Talmud that govern the 
relation of a man to his fellows, precepts of unique 
depth and power: “Mine is mine and thine is thine— 
that is the speech of the mob. Maine is thine and thine 
is mine—these are the words of the spiritually vulgar. 
The good man says: Mine is thine and thine is thine. 
. . - Despise no one and undervalue no thing. There is 
no man but shall have his hour, no thing but will attain 
its use. . . . Condemn no one until you have been in 
his position. . . . Only man’s sins shall be obliterated, 
not the sinner. .. . Wherever thou comest upon the 
trace of man, there God stands before thee.’ ‘These 
precepts embody the natural attitude of a people whose 
Psalmist cried: “If thou, Jehovah, shouldest mark 
iniquities, who could stand?” of a people the last of 
whose Prophets of the older tradition said, “Judge not 
that ye be not judged.” | 

Hand in hand with this intense democrary of spirit 
there has always gone the sense of election. But it must 
not be forgotten that the election was never one to 
favor only. That is its degenerate phase. It was an — 
election to responsibility. “You only have I known 
of all the families of the earth: therefore I will visit 
upon you all your iniquities.”” This sense of responsi- 

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PROGRAM 


bility is deeply graven in the folk-ways of the Jewish 
people. ‘The ambitions of parents for their children, 
their sacrifices for their children’s education are no 
accident. They are part of the immemorial sense of 
responsibility. The Jew must be just and merciful and 
Jearned and thus hallow the Ineffable Name. He must 
be, in some sort, “a light to the Gentiles; to open the 
blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, 
and them that sit in darkness out of the prisonhouse.” 
For is it not written: “Is not this the fast that I have 
chosen: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the 
bands of the yoke, and to let the oppressed go free, and 
that ye break every yoke?” Except in this matter of 
moral responsibility the peoples are equal. “Have I not 
brought Israel out of the land of Egypt, and the 
Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir?’ 
And still more emphatically: “Blessed be Egypt my 
people, and Assyria, the work of my hands, and Israel, 
my inheritance.” This equality was always clear to the 
sages of the Talmud: “A heathen that doeth good is of 
as much worth as the high priest in Israel.” Israel’s 
election, in brief, is an election to service. Israel is 
merely the instrument of salvation. Through it salva- 
tion is to be “unto the end of the earth”: through it 
“all the kindreds of the nations shall worship” before 
God. “All the nations shall be gathered” unto the 
capital of the Messianic kingdom; the house of its God 
“shall be called a house of prayer for all people.” To 
strive after justice and peace for all men, to have no 
reward except in that striving, to be elected to terrible 


responsibility and to the sufferings of all those who, 
[275 ] 


ISRAEL 


oppose the fierce and pagan instincts of man—such is 
the somber and glorious mission of Israel... . 

And Israel has no weapon. Force is futile. “By 
strength shall no man prevail.” Nor must Israel ally 
itself with physical power: “Woe to them that go down 
to Egypt for help, and rely on horses and trust in 
chariots, because they are very strong.” Violence can- 
not bring justice; peace is never born of war. 
“Truth, justice and peace,” declares the Talmud, “these 
are the pillars of human society.” ‘The ideal of Israel 
is “to break the sword and the bow and the battle out 
of the land.” And this can be done only by the strength 
of the spirit. “The prophet that prophesieth of peace, 
when the word of that prophet shall come to pass, then 
shall the prophet be known that Jehovah hath truly 
sent.” Peace is the test. Peace is the sign. “How 
beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that 
bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace.” Peace 
is the mark of the universal and Messianic kingdom on 
earth which it is the mission of Israel to bring into 
being: “And it shall come to pass in the latter days, that 
the mountain of Jehovah’s house shall be established 
on the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above 
the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. And many 
peoples shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to 
the mountain of Jehovah, to the house of the God of 
Jacob; and he will teach us his ways, and we will walk 
his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and 
the word of Jehovah from Jerusalem. And he will 
judge between the nations, and will decide concerning 
many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into 
plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation 

[ 276 ] 


PROGRAM 


shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they 
learn war any more.” 

An idea, a dream, an aspiration that have sustained 
and preserved a people through dark and hostile ages. 
Egypt and Assyria, Greece and Rome are gone. The 
peoples of the sword have perished. ‘The people of the 
spirit remains... . 


IV 


I shall not be accused of honoring tradition unduly or 
of wanting any man to be guided by it. But to the 
modern Jew the tradition of Israel is not useful as a 
guide; it is, as I have said before, useful as a confirma- 
tion of all he is and desires. If a Jew were to say: I 
find nothing in those traditions that corresponds to my 
convictions, to the tendencies of my inner self; I am an 
American; I believe in the immigration laws of my coun- 
try and in the warlike expenditures of my government 
and in the Republican party and in Japanese exclusion 
and in making the nigger know his place. ... If any 
Jew says that, the traditions of his people have, 
obviously enough, lost any possible relation to his mind 
and character. But there are, I believe, not many such. 
There is servile assimilation; there are propitiatory 
gestures. There are Jews who not only contribute to 
Christian charities, as indeed they should, but who give 
moneys for the building of Anglican cathedrals while 
there is not money enough for the oppressed of Poland 
to get to Palestine. The great majority of Jews, how- 
ever, are liberal, pacifist, humanitarian. To these people 
it should bring strength and courage and inner dignity 
to know that their convictions and ideals have been the 

[277 ] 


ISRAEL 


central convictions and ideals of their folk for at least 
two thousand five hundred years; that by virtue of these 
convictions and ideals, Israel has survived the un- 
imaginable wars, persecutions, tumults, catastrophes of 
that long period and is a light in the world today to bear 
witness to the reality of its conception of righteousness, 
to the victory whose name is peace. 

I have called this chapter “Program,” because from a 
blending of their living convictions with the traditions 
of Israel modern Jews may definitely motivate their 
instinctive actions as well as proceed to other actions 
from which they are inhibited only by ignorance and 
fear. 

It is proper and inevitable, to begin with a humble 
matter, that Jewish merchants and industrialists should 
never exclude Christians from their employment, 
although many Christians will not employ Jews. It is 
quite right that we should contribute to Christian 
charities even though Christians do not often contribute 
to ours. It is a foregone conclusion that, if we establish 
any educational or learned institutions, Gentiles of all 
creeds and races shall be admitted to these institutions 
on an equal basis with ourselves. But these things must 
be understood to be not the result of a facile good- 
nature or as the concessions of weakness. They must 
be understood to be part of the positive ideals and 
polities that belong to Israel as a people of humanity 
and of peace. 

It is equally proper and inevitable that Jews should 
resist all forms of oppression anywhere in the world; 
that they should codperate with all who strive for social 
justice and economic peace, that they should insist in 

[ 278 | 


PROGRAM 


season and out that the so-called “Jewish radical” is 
not, from the Gentile point of view, a radical at all. 
He is merely'a Jew... 

It follows that, wherever they live, Jews must throw 
the weight of their strength and influence against the 
power of the absolute, belligerent, master State and that 
their supreme way of doing this is by aiding in the up- 
building of Palestine and insisting that their devotion 
to Palestine, far from interfering with their civic rights, 
is prophetic of the freer citizenship of the state of the 
future. 

For myself I have still another ideal. It is a hard one 
and even those who have followed me so far may shrink 
from this ultimate task and test. I do not think that 
Jews should fight any more. Not on any side. Not 
for any cause. Their records in the World War suffice 
to repel the charge of cowardice. Indeed they are 
supremely brave. For no Jew likes to fight. Yet the 
Jews forced themselves to fight and many on all sides 
of the conflict were conspicuous for gallantry. It was 
pathetic; it was wrong. Jews should not consent to 
the horror and degradation of military servitude. What 
people or, if one pleases in this matter, what faith has 
a better right to withdraw itself from the barbarism of 
war? Like the admirable Quakers we should declare 
that war is opposed to our instincts, to our conscience, 
to the tradition of our prophets and sages and saints 
for more centuries than have passed since the birth of 
any of the war-like modern nations. Not more of our 
conscientious objectors would be shot than were killed 
in Flanders and in Poland. No more devastating 
pogroms would follow than those which desolated the 

[ 279 | 


ISRAEL 


Ukrainian plains, no crueler tyranny than now holds 
sway from Vilna to the Black Sea. We cannot fare 
worse by refusing to fight. We can shed our blood and 
endure our martyrdom for peace. We can be true to 
ourselves and to Israel. We can be like the Quakers a 


light to them who are in darkness. . . . For myself I 
hold this ideal. . . . I do not expect it to be accepted 
today. . . . But its day will come.... - 


In the meantime every Jew can find himself. I have 
done so. Not everyone need go upon so long a 
pilgrimage. But everyone can come home to himself 
and to Israel and learn that to be a Jew is to be a friend 
of mankind, to be a proclaimer of liberty and peace. 


THE END 


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